Before the war with the Spanish, the god Xiuhtecuhtli was a fire god. Like the fire god. Every fifty years or so, the Aztecs would make a sacrifice to him by carving out a victim’s heart and setting a burning clump of pine sticks in the cavity. Which honestly just feels like insult to injury.
Anyway, Xiuhtecuhtli got taken out by Quetzalcoatl, who got hold of his power. When I met Q in Zacatecas he’d put the fires into something a little more portable, the Zippo lighter.
One of the things with tlepilli is that they’d be used to light others. Do it right and long enough and once you have one going, you never need to make a fire again. Just keep lighting new tlepilli.
In Vernon there were hundreds, maybe thousands of them. If each is magically linked to another, half of them could be scattered across the city and the other half somewhere else, like a bunch of remote fuses.
Tlepilli aren’t big. They’d be easy to hide and nobody’d think about one if they saw it. Lighting them with regular fire probably wouldn’t do much. But if they’re lit with the Zippo? We could have a situation that makes the Vernon fire look like a goddamn Fourth of July sparkler.
I can already hear other sirens down below. I need a ride out of here fast. I grab the keys for a blue Porsche from the valet stand, but before I can turn around to get to it I feel a stabbing pain in my back and every muscle in my body seizes up.
I hit the ground face first, and someone kicks me over. The sicaria stands over me holding a Taser, the leads going to barbs digging into my back. I try to move, which only barely works, so she hits me again.
“Oh, no,” she says, her English heavily accented, and hits me with another jolt. “I don’t fucking think so.” She pulls a couple wadded up pieces of paper from her pocket.
Paper charms. Kind of like my Sharpie magic. You write glyphs on the paper and cast the spell into it. When you want it to work, you trigger it, throw it on the ground, light it on fire, whatever. I saw a woman kill a train car full of people with one and then later set off an earthquake along Santa Monica Boulevard.
“One of these kills you,” she says. “The other one knocks you out. But I can’t read this shit.” She shows me one of the charms, Aztec glyphs burned into the thick paper. “I’m pretty sure this picture’s death. Or maybe a rabbit? You know, fuck it. It doesn’t matter.” She wads up one of the papers and tosses it onto me. It bursts like flashpaper when it hits my chest and everything goes black.
* * *
—
It’s so dark when I come to that it takes me a minute to realize I’m not still unconscious. Then dim, hazy lights pass overhead. I can feel the floor move beneath me. My body hasn’t caught up with my brain, and when it does I realize the floor isn’t moving, I am. I’m being dragged. I try looking up to see who’s dragging me, but I still can’t move.
I’m not sure where I am or what just happened, but something in the back of my head is telling me that this isn’t just bad, it is double-plus-un-good.
I fade back into unconsciousness a couple of times, each time coming out more aware than the last. I’m pretty sure this is an office building. Acoustic tile on the ceiling but cement on the floor. The lights stopped being the kind of fluorescent tubes that suck out all your Vitamin D and possibly your soul a ways back, and now what little illumination there is comes from the occasional work light.
I’ve tried casting a couple of spells, but I can’t concentrate well enough to do a damn thing. I fade back into unconsciousness and when I come to again I’m in some sort of workshop. I can hear an air compressor, and one of my arms has been hauled up over my head.
“Oh, you’re up.” Sastre stands over me, holding my hand up over a table where I can’t see it. She has a surprisingly strong grip. I guess it’s from all that chopping off heads. “Good. I wanted to make sure you were awake for this.”
The room is a corner office suite in a skyscraper that’s being renovated. Carpet pulled out, internal walls knocked down. Windows cover every foot of the exterior, giving an amazing view of nighttime Los Angeles, a blanket of jeweled streetlights, cars, homes, all the way out to the horizon.
She hauls me up until my left arm is completely on the table. Now that I can see the table better, I can tell it’s an empty cable spool that’s been put on its side.
“I had these made special for you,” she says. What the hell is she talking about? I try to pull out of her grip but I’m still too groggy, too weak. “He wanted something that would hurt you. I planned on crucifying you and setting you alight, but he said that would kill you too fast. This way I can hurt you for days.”
She picks something up and I recognize it right before she slams it down onto my hand. The nailgun pops as she drives three long nails through my hand and into the top of the table.
If I wasn’t awake before I sure as fuck am now. There’s nothing but pain and blood and her laughing mixing with a noise I kind of think is me screaming. I pull myself up and look down at what she’s done.
I want to pull the nails out, or my hand out, or something, but I don’t know where to start and every shift brings on new agony. The nails dimple the skin like buttons. Blood wells up from the wounds, pools under my hand.
The pain isn’t just in my hand. It’s in my bruised ribs, all the cuts and scrapes and bruises. They light up like Satan’s own Christmas tree. Behind the pain, behind the whole what-the-fuckness of being nailed to a table, there’s something else; I can’t feel any magic.
There must be something besides blind agony in my eyes because she smiles big and proud, like I’m the slow student who just figured out his times tables. “They block magic. You can’t cast any spells. Oh, and I took these, too.” She shows me the Browning and the straight razor. She drops them into my messenger bag on the floor, and kicks the whole thing across the room.
“I am so gonna fuck your shit up,” I say through gritted teeth. I try to reach for the magic but nothing comes. I’ve been cut off from my own magic before. It’s a pain in the ass. Right now, it’s a pain everywhere else. Some of my tats act as pain buffers, skin and bone strengtheners. Without them I couldn’t take the sorts of beatings I’ve had, and now they don’t work. After going a couple rounds with a pissed off wind god and having nails shot through my hand, I could really use them.
“I don’t think so,” she says, “but it’s good to have goals. It’ll keep you alive longer. And I have a whole long strand of nails to use. But we’ll get to that. I have one last job to do. See?”
She gestures to the side and I look, already guessing what’s there. The pain can’t match the shock of what I’m seeing. Pallets of tlepilli laid out in rows along the floor. Each pallet about four feet square, each tlepilli maybe an inch thick with some space separating it from its neighbor. I try doing math, but I can barely think straight. I settle on two-hundred, maybe two-fifty per pallet?
I stop counting pallets when I hit about twenty and see that they cover the floor of the rest of the open office suite leading into the darkness.
She limps over to the pallets, leaving a trail of blood behind her. That gunshot in her leg is gonna slow her down. She’ll need to get it fixed up. But I get the feeling she’s not too worried about getting that far.
“These took forever to build,” she says. “But they’ll burn very fast.” She pulls out the Zippo and flips it open.
I push through the pain and haul myself and the cable-spool table toward her. I get a few feet, my hand tearing, sweat pouring off me from the pain. But she’s too far away to get to in time.
She flicks her thumb along the striker. Blue flames erupt around the wick. She limps over to one of the palettes and sets one of the tlepilli on fire. The flames are like I remember seeing on Isla de La Muñecas. They consume and spread, jumping from one bundle to another, each one transferring the magic of the flames to some unknown location. The room glows in eerie blue light, reflecting back on its
elf in the windows. I see other blue flames erupting outside. Tiny little dots across the city. Like voracious moths eating a tapestry, the flames grow into raging infernos in seconds. Below us, Los Angeles burns.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” she says, and through the haze of pain and shock I have to agree with her. It is beautiful. A beautiful horror show of flame and death.
And that’s only one palette. It burns to ash quickly. I catch sight of a protection circle painted on the floor beneath the ash before the light dies down. Smart. The flames won’t spread beyond any one pallet or set the building on fire.
She lights another one and her face is orgasmic. She doesn’t even look out the window. She’s transfixed by the burning pallets, their blue glow pulling her in.
Which means she’s not paying attention to me. Not that that does me any good. I’m nailed to a table, I can’t cast, my gun and straight razor are across the room, and my pocket watch—
Huh. My pocket watch is still in my pocket. I pull it out with my right hand. If these nails are blocking me from accessing magic, does that extend to something I’m holding?
She’s too far away for the pocket watch to do its thing to her, and even if it could she’s too close to the tlepilli. This thing has a mind of its own sometimes and I can see it just hitting the tlepilli, which might actually be worse than the flames.
So I focus on what I can do. I point the watch face toward the top of the table. I’ve never used it on anything that I was physically attached to before, so it might affect me as much as it does the table. And boy will that ever suck.
But I’m out of options. I spin the crown with my thumb and push down on it. The table starts to age, wood cracking, turning black, bits falling off. I’m afraid it’s making too much noise, the smell of wood rot too strong. But Sastre is in too much ecstasy over the next burning palette to care about anything else.
In a minute or so, the last of the table turns to ash and sawdust and I’m free. Well, free-ish. I still have three magic-warding nails stuck in my hand. I bolt toward Sastre, hoping I can tackle her and at least get the lighter away. She turns at the sound, my only chance of catching her unawares shot.
The look on her face is confusion at first, then rage. Then she pulls a knife and runs at me.
That’s right, sweetheart. Run right into the time-bending pocket watch. Except she doesn’t. Stupidly I’ve got it held out in front of me, waiting for her to come in close, but she’s faster than I thought, and before I can tap the crown she kicks it out of my hand. It skitters across the cement out of sight.
She slashes at me, just a little too far away. She cuts across my chest, but it’s too shallow to do any real damage.
I get in past her arm and get an elbow into her face. There’s a loud pop, and blood streams from her nose. She sweeps her leg and knocks me onto my ass. In the long run, I can tell, she’s going to win. I’m at more of a disadvantage. I’m not going to last much longer in the state I’m in, and the second I miss a block it’s game over.
She raises the knife over her head and leaps down on me like a wrestler. I block her arm with mine, knocking it aside. I realize too late that it’s left me open on one side. But she’s exposed, too. If I had a weapon . . .
Oh, wait. I do have a weapon. I slam the palm of my left hand hard against the side of her neck, the nails sticking out of my hand punching through her flesh and into her throat.
A flare of agony washes up my arm and I want to pass out and throw up at the same time. It’s a toss-up which one of us it hurt more. I’m going with her. I’m just in pain. She’s fountaining blood. At most I think I nicked the artery, but she’s still pumping out an awful lot of blood.
“Yeah? How ya like them apples?” I yell, more than a little hysterical. What the hell does that even mean? She gurgles as blood fills her throat and runs down her neck. I push her off of me. She rolls to her feet and hops up. I figure we’re going to have another go-round. If we do, I don’t think I’ll live through it.
Instead, hand pressed hard against her neck, she runs, lighting the Zippo and letting it pass over a few pallets as she does, all of them bursting into blue flame.
I’m in no shape to go after her. My vision’s blurring and I’m trying really hard to not throw up. She got about ten pallets lit, maybe more. That’s more than two thousand fires. With the heat and the wind, they’re going to spread.
I get over to my messenger bag, find my cell phone, call Letitia.
“Where are you?” she says.
“I’m good, how are you?”
“I said—”
“At the top of some skyscraper in Downtown.”
“There are fires breaking out all over the city,” she says. “I’m getting phone calls to come in. The entire city’s on tac alert. Gabriela told me what that bundle of sticks you found was. Is that what this is? Everybody’s assuming it’s a terror attack.”
“You could call it that,” I say. “Yes, it’s her. Yes, she lit a bunch of ’em on fire. But the good news is that she didn’t light ’em all on fire. And I stabbed her. With the nails.” I don’t feel so good. The pain from the nails has turned into more of a heavy throb. Like dubstep.
“How many did she—wait. Nails?”
“Yeah, she stuck me to a table with a nail gun. Anyway, she lit a bunch of ’em, Two thousand, twenty-five hundred? But there are a lot left.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much. I think the lighter’s magic gets kind of screwy when she uses the tle—things. Sorry. I’m in a lot of pain. I think I’m gonna pass out now.”
“Wait. What building are you in?”
“You sound really far away,” I say. Or maybe I think it? I can’t tell. I’m really not doing well. I wonder if this is because my tattoos aren’t working. I’ve been blocked off before, but the last time I was facing down a pair of demons and that kind of sharpens your focus.
“I’m gonna lie down for a bit. Hey, if you happen to find me, can you bring me a first aid kit and a claw hammer?”
I don’t know if she answers me or not.
Chapter 33
I snap awake, sitting up like I’m spring-loaded, eyes wide, the world in vibrant, vibrating color. My heart jackhammers in my chest. I’m still on the half-finished office floor, Letitia kneeling next to me.
My left hand is heavily bandaged. It doesn’t hurt, oddly enough, but there’s a burning where Letitia has jammed an atropine autoinjector into my thigh. I’ve never seen one before, but even in the dim light I can read the label with disturbing clarity.
“You weren’t waking up,” she says. “So I hit you with the injector. We carry them in our first aid kits in case of chemical attacks.”
“That happen a lot?” This shit hits hard and fast and though I’m really, really awake I can tell this is going to suck even more later.
“Not so far, but occasionally somebody huffs bug poison.”
“You couldn’t have used smelling salts?”
“I needed to let out some aggression.”
“On me?”
“You were here. You needed to wake up. I figure it was a win-win.” I’m sure there’s a hole in that logic somewhere but I’m not seeing it. I look at my bandaged left hand, and spot the hammer and nails on the floor. I can taste the magic again, the mix of cultures, attitudes, and religions that makes L.A.’s magic stand out from New York, San Francisco, or any other city.
“Thanks,” I say. “Please don’t stab me again. Twice in one lifetime is enough. How’d you find me?”
“I can do all sorts of fancy phone shit without a warrant. I was able to have it tracked.”
“How long was I out?”
“About an hour. It’s a fucking nightmare out there. Massive fires are kicking up all over the place. Police and Sheriff have called a tac alert and everybody’s been pulled off everyth
ing but dealing with these fires.”
She helps me to my feet. Not only can I not feel my left hand, I can’t move it. I raise it up so she can see it flopping uselessly to the side.
“Vivian told you I probably broke something and to pump it full of Lidocaine, didn’t she?” That would happen from time to time when we were together. I’d get into a fight I couldn’t punch my way out of. If it wasn’t for her I doubt I’d be able to hold anything.
“Xylocaine,” she says. She holds me steady as I take a few tentative steps. The atropine has me a little wobbly, and there’s something wrong with my leg that’s got me limping. “Other than that, how are you feeling?”
“My heart’s about to explode out of my chest, I don’t even want to think about what my hand looks like. Now that the magic’s back, my tattoos are doing their job and I don’t feel like I’ve been run over by a train quite so much. Could still use some Vicodin.”
“Has it occurred to you that you might have a problem?”
“I have several problems. Just ask Vivian. Right now it’s finding a psychotic arsonist who, unless she’s dead, isn’t done lighting shit on fire.”
“With all the chaos out there she’s going to be hard to find.”
“I don’t know if this’ll help, but I think she might be in a blue Porsche. I was stealing one when she tased me and had the keys in my hand. Other than that, I don’t know where she might be. Other than burning everything down.”
I take a moment to look out the window and watch Los Angeles in flames. A thick blanket of smoke has covered the city, the fires and streetlights glowing beneath. Occasionally one flares up over the smoke.
“She left a lot of these things,” Letitia says. “We can’t leave these lying around. If we break them, will the ones they’re connected to break?”
“Maybe,” I say. “I don’t know. As long as they haven’t been triggered, they—” An idea pops into my head. I wonder if it would work. I search the ceiling until I find what I’m looking for, a circular metal plate a few inches wide. Every ten feet or so there’s another one. I drag a ladder over from the corner of the suite underneath it and climb on top.
Fire Season Page 23