The Initiate

by James L. Cambias

  Plenty of time.

  Sam got an hour’s sleep parked at a Home Depot in the Bronx until it opened at six. He bought a cordless drill, a charger he could plug into the car’s power outlet, an expensive titanium drill bit, all the paint thinner they had on the shelf, a funnel, a crowbar, and a box of matches. He paid cash.

  If Gola was smart, he’d be on a plane by now, getting as far away from any Apkallu as he could.

  But when Sam tried the hatch in the basement on 182nd Street he found it latched on the inside. He shook his head at the doctor’s foolishness, then set about drilling a hole in the metal. He used the crowbar to block the handle so it couldn’t be opened from inside, and poured twenty gallons of paint thinner through the hole he’d drilled. Gola’s shouts and bangings didn’t disturb him much when he thought of the young woman whose body the doctor had drained of blood and taken apart.

  He dropped in a match and was rewarded with a deep, almost subsonic whoosh and a jet of blue flame that roared out of the little hole in the hatch and reached all the way to the ceiling. Sam ran for the exit and closed it carefully behind him before walking away like any early-morning New Yorker heading for work.

  He phoned Moreno again at eight, as fire engines came screaming from the station just three blocks away. “Bad news,” he said. “I think whoever torched the Waifs’ Home got to Gola.”

  “Can you capture his ghost?”

  “I’ll try. What was his full name?”

  “I don’t know. I’m at the cottage right now—maybe Miss Elizabeth wrote it down someplace. I’ll ask MoonCat if she knows.”

  “So is she in charge at the cottage now?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Pretty neatly done,” said Sam, trying to sow a little suspicion. He was certain MoonCat would be doing the same about him.

  “We can talk about that later.”

  “Call me if you get the name,” Sam reminded him.

  As soon as he got back to his crummy apartment Sam got in touch with Lucas. “I got her, but I’ve got a problem.”

  “Congratulations, my boy. You’ve accomplished something that neither Elliott Ness nor the House of Habsburg could manage. What is the problem?”

  “There’s one witness. I killed him, but Moreno might be able to call his ghost. He doesn’t have anything definite on me, but if Moreno asks him the right questions he could figure it out.”

  “I see. Do you have his name?”

  “No. Moreno’s trying to find it.”

  “Anything belonging to him? His corpse, perhaps?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything left of that.”

  “Thoroughness is one of your most admirable traits. Unfortunately that doesn’t leave us much to work with. With no name or physical link you could wind up summoning just about anything.”

  “I guess I just have to hope Moreno can’t find his real name.”

  “Mmm. Mr. Moreno is an inveterate tugger on loose ends. You mustn’t leave any for him to find. Ah! I have it: give him a fait accompli. Tell him you’ve secured the ghost in question. Today is Monday—an auspicious day for tricksy spirits. If you can put Moreno off until after sunset, I can provide you with an impostor, who will throw the blame elsewhere.”

  “How could I bind up a ghost in the middle of the day? It’s not even Saturday.”

  “Tell him you sacrificed some of your own blood at the place your subject died. It’s plausible, especially if the spirit in question wants to communicate something.”

  Chapter 23

  The rest of the day was nerve-wracking for Sam. Moreno called him twice, and both times Sam had to fight panic. If Moreno had Gola’s name he’d insist on calling up the ghost himself. But the first time was just a routine check-in.

  The second time Moreno called he sounded on the verge of panic. “Forget about the ghost and get your ass down here. Someone just sent a pack of scorpion demons against MoonCat. We’re all okay; the house stopped them. I think whoever sent them was just testing her, but now MoonCat’s ready to go nuclear and I don’t have the Mitum with me to shut her down.”

  “What do you want me to do? I don’t think MoonCat will listen to me, either.”

  “Just try to keep her from freaking out.”

  Sam’s initial reaction was to hurry, but he was touching the screen of his phone to summon a cab when he stopped himself. This was the goal, wasn’t it? The Apkallu were tearing each other apart, just as Lucas had planned.

  So he turned off his phone and rode the subway to 116th Street, then walked six blocks to Miss Elizabeth’s house—MoonCat’s house, he supposed he should call it now. With the contents of the yellow cottage and anything she might have inherited from Hei Feng and Taika, MoonCat was suddenly a power to be reckoned with in the Manhattan Circle.

  As he approached the cottage he spoke the words to open his Inner Eye. The alley was still hard to find, but this time no guardians tried to keep him from entering. In fact, he couldn’t sense any guardians at all.

  He stopped at the far end. Something had happened to the courtyard and the tidy little garden, that much was obvious. Every surface—except for a circle around the yellow cottage itself—was pitted with holes. They ranged from tiny pinpricks to what looked like .50-caliber bullet pocks, and all were surrounded by little blackened and burnt patches. Lightning? Meteorites? A rain of acid? They covered the ground and the walls of the surrounding buildings. The garden was shredded, and the cobblestone pavement of the courtyard was smashed to gravel.

  The house itself looked untouched, so Sam took a deep breath and walked up to the front door. He knocked, then opened the door and looked inside. The living room was undamaged, but he could hear MoonCat shouting and the sound of smashing glass from upstairs. Sam pulled the counterfeit Glock out of his jacket pocket and charged up the stairs.

  In the magical workroom on the top floor he found MoonCat standing in the center of a protective pentagram, shaped from silver wire. She was holding a big leather-bound notebook and a brown paper grocery bag stood on the floor next to her. As Sam came through the door she read aloud from the book. “Pada William Charles Pharo Van Leyden. Taga!” She finished by hurling a clay jar from the bag at the floor outside the pentagram. It shattered and Sam’s Inner Eye perceived a lion-headed scorpion demon emerge and fly off through the open gable window.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  Her look was pure fury. “Someone killed my mother, my father, and Miss Elizabeth. You and Moreno didn’t do anything—so I will! She had a list of people’s names and a whole box full of demons. I’m going to make them all pay!”

  She dug another clay jar out of the bag. “Pada Maria Theresa Sylvia Varaszlo. Taga!” She smashed that jar and a seven-headed serpent with rainbow wings boiled out and soared away through the window.

  She looked back at Sam, as if challenging him. He saw her face, blazoned with anger and grief, and couldn’t think of a reason to stop her. Finally he said, “Moreno’s on his way back here with the Mitum. You’d better clear out before he shows up.”

  “Pada Karel Beloch Rozemberk. Taga,” she said, and hurled one final jar. The thing that emerged was an eye surrounded by dozens of wings, with dozens of eyes on the wings and wings around each of the eyes. It hovered for a moment, then vanished.

  “Do you even know who these people are?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

  Just then something struck the roof, making the walls creak and cracks appear in the ceiling above them. MoonCat looked up, and then at Sam.

  “Looks like somebody’s fighting back,” he said. An instant later everything was drowned out by the cracking and splintering noise of the roof being torn off. A skull the size of a Volkswagen leered down into the attic, and a skeletal hand reached inside for MoonCat.

  “Run!” he shouted, aiming his pistol at an eye socket a yard across.

  She touched her bracelet and shouted “Kulta! Guard!” The shape of a dog appeared in
front of her and launched itself at the giant skeleton. Sam fired his pistol twice at the giant skull as MoonCat fled past him down the stairs.

  The house rocked and creaked again as they scrambled down the stairs, and as the two of them shot out of the front door Sam looked back to see a skeleton four stories tall wrestling with a translucent dog which had grown to stand eye to eye with it. The skeleton tore great rents in the phantom dog with its fleshless fingers, but every time the dog’s jaws closed on its bones, they shattered to dust. The two huge figures crashed into the house again, caving in one wall and bringing down the rest of the roof.

  At last the dog got the skull in its mouth and shattered it with a noise like a wrecking ball hitting a brick wall. The bone fragments rained down and vanished as they hit the ground. Sam saw the ghostly dog collapse, panting. It shrank down to normal size but its gaze never left MoonCat.

  “Good boy,” she said, and its tail wagged as it faded from sight.

  * * *

  The next seven days were more intense than any time in Sam’s life before. Even as a twenty-year-old airman on active duty during the first Gulf War he’d never been so sleep deprived, so tense, and so nervous.

  MoonCat’s tantrum ignited all the smoldering feuds and resentments among the Apkallu, and the blaze spread quickly. MoonCat herself disappeared, maybe hiding, maybe dead. That didn’t stop the magicians she had attacked—or their survivors—from lashing out in revenge or preemptive strikes at real and hypothetical enemies. And the targets of those attacks fought back, of course.

  Half a dozen Apkallu died. One of MoonCat’s demons collapsed the building above Post Academy Instruction and Sylvia’s protective spirits couldn’t save her from a thousand tons of rubble. All three surviving members of the Count’s faction on Long Island were wiped out by a plague of scorpions—ironically, at a meeting to discuss making a peace offer. A hip young Apkal’s car was snatched off the George Washington Bridge by an invisible demon. One paranoid and obese witch in Rhode Island had a heart attack while battling Moreno.

  Sam basically lived at One Police Plaza, creating plausible explanations—freak winds for the bridge incident, or methane gas when a flaming serpent emerged from the subway to destroy a condo in Midtown. He made side trips to Rockefeller Plaza and the New York Times building to divert news coverage and erase pictures which showed too much.

  Moreno careened around the region in the Citroen, venturing as far away as Providence and Washington, using the Mitum to shut down magical attacks and warn off vengeful Apkallu. In addition to the Rhode Island incident he had to battle an enraged wizard in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, though Moreno managed to avoid killing his opponent that time.

  And one afternoon when Sam didn’t have supernatural murders to hide, he decided to walk a couple of blocks north from One Police Plaza to get dim sum for lunch. He hadn’t eaten since the previous night and was ravenous.

  His path took him right past the building where Feng had died, and on the sidewalk he stopped to let a group of people in hard hats go in the front entrance. But one of them stopped and turned to look him straight in the face.

  It was Ash. “I’ll be right up,” she told one of her companions without taking her eyes off Sam. “How’ve you been?”

  “Busy,” he said, which was true. She could see it, too: He saw a look of concern pass across her face. “I’m just back in the U.S. for a couple of days. I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me again.”

  “You’re an idiot,” she said. “Of course I do. In fact—where are you going right now?”

  “Just getting lunch.”

  “I know a good place around the corner. My treat.” She sent a quick text and then turned off her phone. “How long are you in town?”

  “My flight’s tonight,” he lied. “Eight o’clock.”

  “That gives us a few hours,” she said. “Let’s get takeout and go back to my place.”

  He knew he shouldn’t. It was a terrible time, a terrible idea. But he went anyway. They ate noodles and steamed dumplings sitting on her bed, and Sam let her do most of the talking. Her work was going well, apparently.

  When the food was gone and the cartons were in the trash, they faced an awkward moment. The obvious next step was to tumble into bed together, but the easy intimacy of just a few weeks earlier had vanished. They made uncomfortable small talk, avoiding the subject—and then Sam’s phone buzzed. It was the one he used to talk to Moreno.

  “I’ve got to take this,” he said to Ash, and stepped into the bathroom for privacy.

  “Where are you?”

  “Just getting lunch.”

  “Get your butt over to Central Park, Bethesda Fountain. Some idiot tried to hit Isabella and now her friends are loose. I’m still in Jersey.”

  “Right,” he said, and turned off the phone.

  Ash was right outside, trying to hide her disappointment. “You don’t look happy.”

  “I have to go. Something just came up. It was great seeing you again.” He grabbed his jacket from the bed and put it on.

  “When are you coming back?” she asked.

  Damn. She really did miss him. He stuck his hand into his jacket pocket, where the steel arrowhead was, and pricked his finger for the fifth time in two days. “Eresikin Ashley Susan Willard iginudug Ruax. When I leave here, forget my name, forget my face, forget you ever knew me. Segah.”

  She looked at him, confused. “What?”

  “Never mind. I have to go right now.” He hesitated, kissed her forehead and then fled the apartment. As he shut the door, just for an instant he felt the presence of a spirit in the hall, but it flitted away before he could identify it.

  * * *

  “You don’t have to do this, you know,” said Moreno a couple of days later as they finished removing magical traces from the ruins of a waterfront mansion in Rye. A sea serpent had wrecked it during the night. “I mean, I’m glad you’re helping, but I can handle this.”

  “You’re crazy,” said Sam. “There’s no way you can manage alone.”

  “I managed alone just fine since 9/11,” said Moreno. “It’s only since you started hanging around that things have gotten out of hand.” He smiled as he said it, and Sam bit back the urge to defend himself.

  “Don’t worry. I can take care of myself,” he said instead.

  Moreno gestured at the pile of shattered bricks and splintered wood. “Can you? Someone sends a demon to knock down the building you’re sleeping in—you won’t know what’s going on until a couple tons of rubble smack you in the face. I like you, Ace, and I think you could make a good agaus someday. But not if you’re dead.”

  “Relax,” said Sam, now genuinely concerned. He’d never seen Moreno upset before. “I’m not a big player. Nobody cares enough to take me out. You’re the one who should worry.”

  “I don’t understand why everybody’s so crazy lately,” said Moreno, looking at the insurance investigators photographing the site. “For years, all of us understood the rules. Somebody pushed a little too far, I’d show up, give a warning, and that was it. Now…every time I think it’s over and things can get back to normal, boom! Another murder. And then revenge, and then more revenge. I can’t make it stop.”

  “Don’t blame yourself.”

  “Why not? It really is my fault. The whole reason we have an organization, the whole reason I’m an agaus—is so that people don’t try to make their own justice. Same reason the subs have laws and cops. But if I can’t punish the guilty, how can I tell people not to do it themselves?”

  “Okay, but beating yourself up doesn’t do anything. Be analytical. You said you kept the peace by yourself for years. What changed?”

  Moreno shrugged. “Not much. No new players on the board. Things were stable—and then everybody went nuts. It’s like someone’s trying to tear us apart.”

  Sam hesitated before answering. He found himself oddly reluctant to lie to Moreno. But the Apkallu were his enemy, and Moreno was their defender. He clear
ed his throat and spoke. “It can’t be someone inside the organization. We’ve all sworn oaths. Those are unbreakable, right?”

  “Supposed to be,” said Moreno. “Go on.”

  “Well, then it’s got to be someone on the outside. You once told me there are normal people—subur—who know about the Apkallu. Inside the government. Maybe they’ve decided to take us down.”

  Moreno squinted into the distance for a moment, then shook his head. “Most of the killings have used magic. We’re the only ones who can do that.”

  “Are we?” asked Sam. “What about—oh, I don’t know, Tibetan or Aztec wizards? Or some secret offshoot of the Apkallu?”

  “That’s a pretty big what-if. What if it’s space aliens or time-travelers from Atlantis?”

  “Isn’t it at least worth checking out?”

  “Yeah, but how?”

  Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. You’re the one with all the mysterious sources. Here’s one idea: Have you ever been called in to cover something up, but all the Apkallu claimed it wasn’t them?”

  “All the time. They’re like a bunch of kindergarteners. ‘I didn’t do it. I don’t know who did it. You can’t prove it was me.’”

  “Well, maybe we should start digging around the weirdest incidents.”

  “We? Tell you what: As soon as we get some spare time I’ll give you a list of weird stuff I’ve seen. You can go poking around, see if you turn up any bonpas or nahualli hiding in the bushes.”

  “Sure!” said Sam, for the moment so caught up in his own clever idea that he nearly forgot it was all a lie to misdirect Moreno. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to put the Mitum in my pocket and go around to all the surviving members of the Circle of the West and tell them to call a truce before I start breaking heads. Roger will back me up. I’m not bluffing, either. And then…” He looked at Sam, his expression unreadable. “Then I think I’m going to take a little vacation for a week or two. Someplace with a beach.”