“What are you doing?”
“If I’m lucky, cooling things off a bit.” If I understand the magic that was used to link the tlepilli together it should be a one-shot deal. At the very least this should deactivate the tlepilli.
I cast a small fire spell and a flame appears at my fingertips. I hold it under the plate until it pops off from the heat, revealing a recessed sprinkler. A moment later, the sprinkler goes off.
Realizing what I was about to do, Letitia’s grabbed a piece of cardboard from the floor and put it over her head. It’s not helping much, but it’s keeping the worst of the water off her.
“Why aren’t the others going off?” I say, yelling over the waterfall roar of the sprinkler. I’m soaked to the skin. Considering the temperature is in the upper nineties, at the very least I’m not complaining.
“They all have their own sensors.” She drops the cardboard, puts her hands out toward the far end of the room over the pallets. The plates go red hot within seconds and pop off, the sprinklers kicking in a moment later.
“Fine. Be all efficient about it.”
“Do you think it’ll work?” I’m about to say it depends on what she means by “work,” but before I can answer her, a flash in the sky outside is followed by a peal of thunder.
“It’ll do something,” I say. The sprinklers will only go on for about five minutes. It might help the flames from spreading a little bit, but not by much.
Raindrops begin to tap the windows. Within seconds it’s a torrent, then a monsoon hammering at the glass, washing ash down in thick streaks. The tlepilli are soaked all the way through. A few minutes later, the sprinklers shut off, the rain outside dying down a few moments later.
From our vantage point there doesn’t appear to be any difference, but I wouldn’t expect there to be. We added water to the mix, but the winds and heat are still high and shit’s still burning. A four minute power wash isn’t going to stop it. I just hope it helps contain things a little bit, and even if it doesn’t, we’ve taken the remaining tlepilli out of play.
I gather up my messenger bag and check inside. It’s a little damp, but nothing’s ruined and the ledger is dry as a bone. I wonder if it, like everything it’s used to record, has some magic of its own. I find the pocket watch over by a window, dry it off on my sleeve, and slide it into my pocket.
We take the elevator down, clothes dripping. “Maybe you should have thought that out a little better,” Letitia says, wringing out one pant leg.
“Hey, you said we couldn’t leave them lying around,” I say. “Besides, I only turned on the one sprinkler. You—” I double over like I’ve been punched in the gut. Through the elevator I can hear a distant, muffled explosion.
“You all right? What happened?”
“I’m fine. It just hurts.” I wave her off. “It’s a necromancer thing.” A hundred and twelve people just died in one shot nearby. Eighty-seven left ghosts behind.
There are factories, warehouses, and trains just on the other side of the river. What if a propane tower went? Christ, what happens if a gas main goes up? A couple years back a natural gas pipeline under a suburban neighborhood in the Bay Area sprung a leak. It left an entire neighborhood devastated. Leveled more than 30 houses. Just completely gone. In their place was a 40-foot-deep crater. It even registered as an earthquake. Miraculously only a handful of people died.
With the inferno raging outside, it isn’t a matter of if it will happen, it’s a matter of when.
The elevator opens onto a brightly lit, empty lobby. Outside, thick smoke swirls through the streets, blown along by the hot, dry Santa Ana winds.
“Shouldn’t there be a security guard?”
“Yes,” Letitia says, drawing her pistol. We step out of the elevator, Letitia checking one side, me checking the other. I have a spell ready to snap off if anything goes south.
“Found the security guard,” I say. “Sort of.” I point out a wide blotch of blood and bone about head height on the outside of the glass doors. From there a thick trail goes up and finally disappears near the top. Wide drops of heavily spattered blood lead out into the street. A blue cap with the name of a local alarm company lies on the ground soaked in blood.
“Do you feel that?” Letitia says. I do. There’s magic in play. It’s not a spell, but it feels very familiar. I don’t see any way to go except out those doors or down to a parking garage, which I’m not sure will be any better.
“Fuck it,” I say, hit the doors and step out into the smoke. Inside the building, with its ventilation, the air was clear enough that it was just a faint background scent, but when I open the doors I’m assaulted with the smells of burning wood and rubber, gasoline and meat, the chemical tang of unidentifiable toxins. A thick slurry of ash mixed with the already drying rain sluices through the gutter.
Letitia comes out behind me. It’s hard to see through the smoke. The halos of streetlights, a nearby skyscraper burning out of control a few blocks away. The wind isn’t helping. It pushes and pulls, and somewhere inside it is that feeling of magic flowing like—
“Swindler,” says a voice, breathy and whistling.
“Cheater,” says a second like dry leaves blowing through a cemetery.
“King of the Dead,” says a third, filled with spite and rage.
“Oh, goddammit.” Like I need this right now.
“Eric, what the hell is going on?”
“Letitia, I’d like to introduce you to the spirit of the Santa Ana winds.”
Chapter 34
“The what?” Letitia stares around, looking for the source of the voices. A furnace-heat blast of wind shoves at us, ash gusting around and over us, coating our still-sopping clothes in gray. We both instinctively put up a shield and stand our ground.
“The fuck is happening, Eric?”
“Don’t worry about it.” I think for a second. “Well, don’t worry about it too much. This isn’t an ambush. It’s a parley.” If they really wanted, they could have taken me out the same way I’m assuming they did the security guard. Poor bastard. The only reason to kill him was to use his corpse as a calling card.
“You broke,” says one voice.
“Our agreement,” says another.
“King of the Dead,” finishes the third.
I called up the winds out in Vasquez Rocks, asking for help and making an agreement that ultimately led to all this.
“First off, I am not King of the Dead. At best I’m Handyman of the Dead. Or maybe Groundskeeper, I don’t fucking know. So stop calling me that. Second, I call bullshit. I didn’t break an agreement with you, because I wasn’t fucking talking to you. You were just a pass-through for Quetzalcoatl. Whether you went along with it willingly or not makes no difference. You misrepresented yourselves, so you can fuck right the hell off.”
The wind picks up again, another gust from multiple directions hammering at our shields. Smoke and ash swirl past. It’s a little hard to breathe and the winds aren’t making things any easier.
“Hit a nerve, did I?” I say. “Big tough wind spirit got taken for a ride by a half-dead Aztec god. More people believe in you than believe in him, yet you’re the patsies. That’s gotta sting.”
The wind dies down, and there’s an expectant pause. “Yes,” say all three voices together. “Where did you send him? We would see this forgettable god again and . . . have words.”
“I—”
“Hang on,” Letitia says, putting a hand on my shoulder. “You’re really the Santa Ana winds?”
“We are,” they say. “We are the Devil Wind, the fire-breath, the wind that gives and the wind that takes.”
“Not to mention Bane of Asthmatics Everywhere,” I say. “Yes, they’re the spirit of the Santa Ana winds. As I was saying, I’m not going to tell you where I sent him, because that’s privileged information. Any dealings we had in the past are
done.”
Letitia’s eyes light up. She gets where I’m going. “This is a clean slate,” she says. “You want that information, you’ll need to pay.”
Whispers through the smoke, a back and forth, unintelligible voices raised. The wind is arguing with itself.
“What is the price?” one says.
“Right now you’re fanning all these fires,” I say.
“It is what we do,” they say. “We are the Devil Wind, the fire-breath, the—”
“Yes, I get it. Stop.” The wind goes quiet.
“That’s not what I meant. Well, it is what I meant, but I also meant ‘stop’ as in ‘stop fanning the flames.’ In fact, try putting some out, or at least helping. Quetzalcoatl might have started this, but you’re keeping it going. He’s playing you. You’re still dancing to his tune.”
“So help stop the fires,” Letitia says. “Clear the smoke. Give the firefighters a chance. This is Los Angeles. We curse you every year, like we curse the rain’s absence. We curse the fires you fan, the air you turn to dry dust. You’re the closest thing we have to the Devil. Try being an angel for once. Trust me. Do this, people will notice.”
“Whatta ya say? Not only do you get the location of Quetzalcoatl, you get your fickle nature as the giver and taker of flame cemented into the history books. All you have to do is what you normally do, just the other way around.”
More whispered bickering. Finally: “Agreed. We will help put out the flames as best we can. We cannot put them out ourselves, but we can assist where possible, and not hinder where it is not. Now, where is the forgettable god?”
“Sitting in a bottle at the bottom of a hole in Mictlan.”
Silence. Then more whispered bickering. “We were hoping it was . . . closer.”
“Getting to him is your business. A deal’s a deal. You have your information. Now get blowin’.” I get a distinct sense of grumbling, like a frustrated child who’s just lost at marbles kicking a can down the street. “Oh, it’s not all bad. You still get to play with fire. It’s just a different game.”
A blast of wind swirls around us, blowing away smoke and ash, then everything goes still. A moment later, no longer blowing through the streets, ash begins to fall like snow.
“I’m dreaming of a gray Christmas,” I say, catching a handful of ash in my hand. I’m still dripping wet, so it’s sticking like lint. Letitia slaps me on the back of the head.
“The fuck was that for?”
“You’re making jokes while people are dying,” she says.
“Have you met me?” I say. “Cut me some slack. I made it rain and I just commanded the wind. I’m like fuckin’ Moses or something. Now let’s go find our arsonist and end this.”
* * *
—
Letitia’s car is half a block up, covered in a layer of ash an inch thick. The other cars on the street—not many at this hour in Downtown—aren’t exactly pristine, but it looks like all the ash and dust that was blown off them was deposited on Letitia’s Crown Vic.
“They’re like a goddamn child, aren’t they?” Letitia says.
“A deadly, arsonist, psychopathic child, yes. Don’t forget what they did to the security guard just to get our attention.” I wince, my step faltering.
“You all right?”
“Yeah.”
“Necromancer thing?”
“Necromancer thing.” Ever since we got down to the lobby I’ve been feeling more and more deaths. No big waves of them, but clusters. A handful here, a dozen there. It’s like standing in a hailstorm. I still feel the small ones, but the big ones really sting.
More worrisome are the ghosts. I can feel the population really starting to stack up. That’s not usually a problem, but too many into one area and things get a little dicey.
The place with the most ghosts I’ve ever seen was in Hong Kong, where Kowloon Walled City had stood just a year before. Originally a fort built in the ninth century, it was beefed up in the late 1800s when the British took over Hong Kong. Seems the Chinese didn’t really trust the Brits. Who’da thunk?
Time goes on. Ownership of the fort goes back and forth. The fort gets torn down when the Japanese invade, but there are still enough chunks left that when the war ends a couple thousand squatters show up and camp out and the population keeps growing. Fire nearly burns the whole thing to the ground in the 50s, kills a whole fuckton of people.
Not a group of people to let wholesale death keep them down, the remaining residents start building on top of the remaining bits of the old. And build. And build. And build. Homes on top of homes. Places sealed away from the sun when somebody builds a new walkway above it. And all this time more and more people move in.
By the time it was cleared and torn down, it was an urban maze of huts and shacks stacked one atop the other and crammed side by side until it filled a six acre space 150 feet high and held 50,000 people. It survived on stolen electricity, illegal wells, and a black market economy.
A place that had been occupied almost two-thousand years that finally ends as a squatters’ paradise. That’s gonna leave a ghost or two. Or a couple hundred thousand. Haunts stuck wandering rat warrens that weren’t there anymore. It was like getting rid of an anthill but leaving all the ants behind.
Too many ghosts and the barrier between our world and their world thins out. Some spots in Kowloon, the barriers might as well have been made of tissue paper. Ghosts passing between worlds from one step to another. Fortunately, most of them were Haunts and Echoes. They weren’t going anywhere. But a couple Wanderers got out while I was there.
I did not enjoy my stay in Hong Kong.
I don’t know if we’ll get anything like that here. L.A.’s so spread out we’re not going to get that kind of density. But before this whole mess is over, the death toll is going to be astronomical.
We get into Letitia’s car, a wash of ash following us inside. Letitia swears, turns on the radio, and listens. It’s like they’re speaking a different language—I don’t know the codes. But after a little while it starts to make sense. It helps that a lot of the calls include some form of the word “fire.” Then one stands out.
“Any Central unit, 480, 487, and possible 502, exiting 110 Freeway at 6th Street. Blue Porsche, license plate 2ZUB069. Code 3. Incident 994 in RD 151.”
Letitia grabs the microphone in a flash. “Control, this is One-Henry-Five. I got this. Code 3, Third and Spring Street. Over.” She’s already peeling the car away from the curb.
“Henry?”
“It’s a call sign. Means detective. A two man patrol car is Adam, like Adam-12?”
“I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about,” I say. “Who the hell is Adam?”
“TV show? About police? In the 60s?”
“Jesus, Tish, I thought we were the same age. I had no idea you were an old lady watching fifty-year-old television shows. Did they drive dinosaurs?”
“Fuck you.”
“Can I call you Henry now?”
She gives me the finger and hits the lights and sirens. I wonder, not for the first time, what the point of an unmarked police car is when it’s so obviously an unmarked police car.
“Seems kinda coincidental that there’d be a blue Porsche just around the corner,” I say. “Henry.”
“Maybe she’s coming back to finish the job,” she says. “Asshole.”
“Ah, shit.”
“What?” she says. “Oh.” The nearby fire we’d seen earlier turns out to be the Bradbury. Vintage building with steel art deco stairs and cage elevators in the middle and offices on the outer edges. It’s an L.A. icon. And flames are pouring out of every opening.
“That’s gonna piss a lot of people off,” I say.
“Where are the firetrucks?” Letitia says.
“Dealing with other fires, I imagine. There are kind of a lot
of them right now.”
Something’s bothering me. It makes sense that Sastre would want to finish what she started. Downtown is a series of one-way streets. Though traffic’s light, and in some cases non-existent—I mean, would you be out during an apocalypse? Letitia’s still obeying street signs.
“Turn around,” I say. “I don’t think Sastre was planning on getting out of this alive. If she’s headed back to the office building, she’s not gonna bother paying attention to one-way streets.”
“Shit.” Letitia pulls the car into a tight U, tires skipping along the pavement, and heads past the burning Bradbury down the street and—yep, there she is.
She pulls to the curb moments before she sees us, and peels out again, gunning the engine. She heads right at us. Letitia gets ready to turn into the Porsche to knock her off the road with a PIT maneuver, but Sastre feints, and pulls a U just as Letitia begins to swerve.
Letitia corrects, but now it’s officially a chase. Letitia calls in for backup, but something tells me we’re on our own.
Chapter 35
We head east going the wrong way down Third toward Little Tokyo and the river, and I begin to see how bad things are. Looking down from the office building, I could see how far out the tlepilli had been placed, but I couldn’t appreciate the magnitude.
We pass whole blocks in flames, some burned down to ash. People have cracked open fire hydrants to help put out the fires. Burned corpses hang half out of windows, dead before they could escape.
I look out on San Pedro Street as we speed by. Skid Row. Over five thousand homeless living in this four square mile area, not to mention all the people living in lofts or working to support the homeless.
Fire Season Page 24