Blood Rites (37 page)

He vanished into the smoke.

Murphy helped me to my feet. She had all the kids join hands, took the hand of the lead child herself, and led us all to the stairs. She bent and scooped up her jeans on the way. There wasn't enough denim left to avoid public indecency, and she dropped them with a sigh.

"Pink panties," I said, looking down. "With little white bows. I wouldn't have guessed that."

Murphy looked too tired to glare, but she tried.

"They really go with the Kevlar and the gun belt, Murph. Shows you're a woman with her priorities straight."

She stepped on my foot, smiling.

"Clear," said Kincaid's voice from the smoke. He appeared again, coughing a little. "Found four coffins occupied. One of them was that One-ear guy you told me about. Beheaded them. Vampires are history."

"Mavra?" I asked.

He shook his head. "That whole end of the hall looks like a chop shop for a black market organ bank. The vampire took that blast from the mine right in the kisser. You'd need her dental records and a jigsaw puzzle all-star to get a positive ID."

Kincaid didn't see Mavra flicker into sight. She rose out of the smoke behind him, horribly torn and mangled, badly burned, and angry as hell. She was missing her lower jaw, half of an arm, a basketball-sized section of lower abdomen, and one of her legs was attached by only a scrap of flesh and her black tights. For all of that, she moved no less swiftly, and her eyes burned with dead fire.

Kincaid saw the look on my face. He dropped flat.

I whipped the stupid little paintball gun out of my duster and emptied it at Mavra.

May lightning strike me dead if the damned thing didn't work like a charm. Hell, better than most charms, and I'm the guy who should know. The shots poured out almost as swiftly as from Kincaid's deadly little machine guns, and they splattered into Mavra, sizzling viciously. Silver fire immediately began chewing at her flesh wherever the paintballs struck and broke. It ripped into her and it happened
fast
, as if some hyperkinetic gourmet were taking a melon bailer to her flesh.

Mavra let out a shocked and dusty shriek.

The holy water and garlic paintballs put a hole as wide as a three-liter bottle of Coke all the way through her. I could see the glow of fire in the pall of smoke behind her. She staggered and fell to her knees.

Murphy drew the machete from her belt and threw it underhand.

Kincaid caught it as he turned back to Mavra, and took her head off at the base of her neck. The head went one way. The body went straight down—there was no thrashing, no howling or spurting ichor, no gales of magical wind or sudden clouds of dust. Mavra's remains simply thumped to the ground, nothing but a withered cadaver once more.

I looked from Mavra's corpse to the paintball gun, impressed. "Kincaid. Can I keep this?"

"Sure," he said. "I'll add it to the bill." He stood up slowly, looking at the destruction. He shook his head. Then he joined us as we went up the stairs. "Even seeing it, it's tough to believe."

"What is?" I asked.

"Your shield. And that bit with all the wind and fire, especially with your hand like that." He glanced at me, something like caution in his expression. "I've never seen a wizard cut loose before."

What the hell. It wouldn't hurt to encourage the mercenary to be wary of me. I stopped and leaned on my staff. The runes still glowed with a sullen fire, though it was slowly fading. Tiny, white wisps of wood smoke curled up from it, sharp in my nose. It hadn't ever done
that
before, but there was no reason to mention that for the time being.

I looked straight at him until it was obvious that he was refusing to meet my eyes. Then I said in a quiet, gentle voice, "You still haven't."

I walked on out, leaving him to stare after me. I didn't think for a second that he would allow what he'd seen to scare him out of killing me if I didn't pay him. But it might scare him enough to make him more cautious about taking that option. Every little bit helps.

Before we got out of the shelter, I took off my duster and draped it onto Murphy's shoulders. It enveloped her entirely, its hem dragging the ground, covering her legs. She gave me a grateful look just as Ebenezar appeared in the doorway. The old man looked at the kids, then at my hand, and drew in a sharp breath.

"You all right to walk yourself out?" he asked.

"So far. We need to get these kids and ourselves the hell away from here."

"Fine," he said. "Where?"

"We'll take the kids to Father Forthill at Saint Mary of the Angels," I said. "He'll have a good idea of what can be done to help them."

Ebenezar nodded. "I know him by reputation. Good man."

We went outside and started loading kids into Ebenezar's old Ford truck. The old man had a gun rack at the back of the cab, his thick old staff in the bottom rack, his old Greener shotgun in the top one. He lifted the kids into the back one by one, where he had them lie down on a thick old thermal blanket and covered them with a second one.

Kincaid came out of the shelter carrying a contractor's heavy garbage bag, the smoke growing thicker behind him. The bag was half full. He threw it over one shoulder, then turned to me and said, "Taking care of details. As I see it, the contract is done. You satisfied with that?"

"Yeah," I said. "Nice working with you. Thank you."

Kincaid shook his head. "The
money
is how you thank me."

"Yeah, uh," I said, "about that. It's Saturday, and I'm going to have to talk to someone at the bank…"

He stepped closer to me and handed me a white business card. It had a number printed on it in gold lettering. There was another number written in ink that made the balance currently in my checking account look extremely small. Nothing else.

"My Swiss account," he explained. "And I'm in no hurry. Have it there by Tuesday and we'll be square."

He got in the van and left.

Tuesday.

Crap.

Ebenezar watched the white van pull out, then helped Murphy get me into the truck. I sat in the middle, my legs over on Murphy's side of the cab. She had a first-aid kit in her hands, and as we rode along she covered my burned hand lightly with gauze, entirely silent. Ebenezar drove off cautiously. We heard sirens start up when we were a couple of blocks away. "The kids to the church," he said. "Then where?"

"My place," I said. "I'll get patched up for round two."

"Round two?" Ebenezar asked.

"Yeah," I said. "If I don't do something, a ritual entropy curse is gonna head my way before midnight."

"How can I help?" he asked.

I looked steadily at him. "We'll have to talk about it."

He squinted out ahead of us and kept his emotions off of his face. "Hoss. You're too involved. You do too much. You take on way too damned much."

"There's a bright side, though," I said.

"Oh?"

"Uh-huh. If I buy it tonight, at least I won't have to figure out how to pay Kincaid before he kills me."

Ebenezar drove, and I felt myself float off into a pensive haze. Well, that wasn't exactly true. It was more of a pense-less haze, but I didn't complain about it. My mouth didn't want to work, and on some level I knew that numb, floating shock was better than searing agony. Somewhere in the background, Murphy and Ebenezar talked enough to work out details, and we must have dropped the kids off with Father Forthill, because when I finally got out of the truck, the back was empty of children.

"Murphy," I said, frowning. "I had a thought. If there's an APB out for me, maybe we shouldn't go back to my place."

"Harry," she said, "we've been here for two hours. You're sitting on your couch."

I looked around. She was right. The fireplace was going, with Mister in his favorite spot by the mantel, and the notch-eared puppy was lying on the couch next to me, using my leg as a pillow. I tasted Scotch in my mouth, one of Ebenezar's own brews, but I didn't remember drinking it. Man, I must have been in worse shape than I thought. "So I am," I said. "But that doesn't make my concerns any less valid."

Murphy had hung my coat up on its hook by the door and was wearing a pair of my knee-length knit shorts. They fell to halfway down her calf, and she'd had to tie a big knot in the front to keep them on, but at least she wasn't walking around in her panties. Dammit.

"I don't think so," she said. "I've talked to Stallings. He said there's an APB for someone matching your description, but your name isn't attached to it. Only that the suspect is wanted for questioning and may be using the alias Larry or Barry. There were no prints on the weapon, but it was registered to the witness." She shook her head. "I don't know how that happened. I'd say you got lucky, but I know better. And you'd make some wiseass remark about it."

I let out a broken little laugh. "Yeah," I said. "Hell's bells. Trixie Vixen has got to be the most vacuous, conceited, small-minded, petty, and self-absorbed baddie I've ever snooped out. That's what happened."

"What?" Murphy asked.

"My name," I said, still wheezing laughter. "She never got it straight. The woman got my freaking name wrong. I don't think she bothers to keep very close track of other people's existence if it doesn't profit her."

Murphy arched an eyebrow. "But there were other people there, weren't there? Someone must have known your name."

I nodded. "Arturo for sure. Probably Joan. But everyone else only knew my first name."

"And someone had to wipe any of your prints from the gun. They're covering for you," Murphy said.

I pursed my lips, surprised. Not so much that Arturo and his people had done it, but because of my reaction to the news—it made a warm spot somewhere inside me that felt almost completely unfamiliar. "They are," I said. "God knows why, but they are."

"Harry, you saved the lives of some of their people." She shook her head. "In the business they're in, I doubt Chicago's finest are exactly making them feel like valued members of the community. That kind of isolation brings people together—and you helped them. Makes you one of them when trouble comes."

"Makes me family," I said.

She smiled a little and nodded. "So you know who dunnit?"

"Trixie," I said. "Probably two others. My sense is that it's the Ex-Mr.-Genosa club, but that's just a hunch. And I think they had help."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because Trixie was getting instructions from someone on the phone when she was holding a gun on me," I said. "And they've been invoking that curse with a ritual. Unless someone's actually got some talent, it takes two or three people to raise the energy that's needed. And let's face it, three witches cackling over a cauldron somewhere is pretty much stereotyped into the public awareness."

"
Macbeth
," Murphy said.

"Yeah. And that movie with Jack Nicholson as the devil."

"Can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"You told me about rituals once. The cosmic vending machine, right? An outside power offers to give you something if you fulfill a specific sequence of events."

"Yeah."

Murphy shook her head. "Scary. People can just do a dance and someone dies. Regular people, I mean. What happens if someone publishes a book?"

"Someone has," I said. "Plenty of times. The White Council has pushed it to happen a couple of times—like with the Necronomicon. It's a reasonably good way to make certain the ritual in question isn't going to work."

She frowned. "I don't get it. Why?"

"Supply and demand," I said. "There are limits to what outside forces can deliver to the mortal world. Think of the incoming power as water flowing through a pipeline. If a couple of people are using a rite once every couple of weeks, or every few years, there's no problem pumping in enough magic to make it work. But if fifty thousand people are trying to use the rite all at once, there isn't enough power in any one place to make it happen. It just comes out as a little dribble that tastes bad and smells funny."

Murphy nodded, following me. "So people who have access to rituals don't want to share them."

"Exactly."

"And a book of dark rituals is not something your average vacuous princess of porn picks up at the mall. So she had help."

"Yeah," I said, frowning. "And that last run on the curse had a professional behind it."

"Why do you say that?"

"It was a hell of a lot faster, for one thing, and deadlier. It hit so quick I didn't have time to redirect it away from the victim, even though I knew it was coming. It was stronger, too. A
lot
stronger, like someone who knew the business had taken the trouble to focus or amplify it somehow."

"What can do that?" Murphy asked.

"Coordination between talented wizards," I said. "Uh, sometimes you can use certain articles and materials to amplify magic. They're usually expensive as hell. Sometimes special locations can help, places like Stonehenge, or certain positions of stars on a given night of the year. Then there's the old standby."

"What's that?" Murphy asked.

"Blood," I said. "The destruction of life. The sacrifice of animals. Or people."

Murphy shivered. "And you think they're coming after you next?"

"Yeah," I said. "I'm in the way. They have to if they want to get away clean."

"Get away with their big old fund intact?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Seems pretty extreme for a greed killing," Murphy said. "I've got nothing against greed as a motivator, but damn. It's like some people just never grasp the idea that other people actually exist."

"Yeah," I said with a sigh. "I guess this time there just happened to be three of them standing in the same place."

"Heh," Murphy said. "God only knows what kind of unholy bad luck got three ex-wives together. I mean, what are the odds, you know?"

I sat up straight. Murphy had put her finger on it. "Stars and stones, you're right. How could I have missed that?"

"You've been a little busy?" Murphy guessed.