Dead Things (26 page)

Like the rest of the pyramid the temple building is huge. Carved snakes and jaguars line the entrance and each brick has a scene depicting someone’s gruesome death in stunning detail. As shrines go it’s a far cry from the back room of a strip mall on Alvarado. Inside, burning braziers cast a golden glow, throw flickering shadows across the stonework, making the carvings dance.

I think about trying to make myself look presentable but toss the thought aside. It’d take a lot more than slicking back my hair and straightening my tie.

Santa Muerte sits on a stone throne at the rear of the building, her scythe in one hand, a globe in the other, her bleached skull hidden behind the veil of her wedding dress. Another throne sits by her side. Empty.

“Talking to you can be a real pain in the ass, you know.”

“You are angry,” she says. “Hardly the sort of behavior I would expect from a supplicant.”

“Damn right I’m angry. But not with you. With Boudreau. You were right. I tracked down his ghost and now he’s gunning for me. And he has a friend of mine. I aim to get him back.”

She lifts her veil and stares at me with those soulless pits of hers. Not moving, not talking.

“I was wondering if you might give me a hand,” I say, finally.

“Why would I do that?” she says. “I’ve offered you power. I’ve offered you a place at my side. You’ve refused my gifts. And now you ask for help. What do you have to offer?”

I take a deep breath, let it out slowly. I know I’m going to regret saying this, know it’s going to come back and bite me in the ass. But I don’t have the firepower to take on Boudreau myself. I can’t see any other way.

“I’ve reconsidered. If you still have that job open.”

Her skull twists to one side. She’s looking at me like a dog that’s just seen a particularly unusual bird. “I don’t know. Convince me.”

Arrogant bitch. “No. You either want me or you don’t. I’m not gonna beg for this. I’ll take my chances alone with Boudreau before I get on my fucking knees. Sorry I wasted your time, Señora. I’ll see myself out.” I turn my back on her, head for the exit.

It isn’t until I’m stepping over the threshold that she says, “Wait.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“Because I need strength and bravery, not a weak willed fool who caves at a little pressure. A test. You passed.”

I turn around to face her. She’s standing inches behind me. I wish she’d stop doing that. “No more tests.”

“No more tests,” she says.

“Then it’s time to negotiate,” I say. “What do you offer for my services?”

“My power added to yours. You will have my command of the dead, you will be known by and safe from my followers. You will have my protection and my help.”

“And in return?”

“You will be my red right hand. You will kill in my name. You will carry out my judgment upon my enemies.”

“I choose if I carry out your orders. You said you don’t want a mindless lackey. I’ll decide.” She says nothing for a long while. I don’t know if she’s thinking or just bailed. There’s no way to read her. I can’t tell if I’ve pissed her off or made her happy.

“Agreed,” she says finally. “But you will not interfere as I carry out a sentence or with whoever I choose as my emissary in your stead.”

“Agreed,” I say. I can feel her boxing me in already. I can think of a hundred ways that one demand can go wrong. “I will not be at your beck and call. I’m independent and I won’t be interfered with. I do a job for you I do it my way.”

“Yes. But know that you will be mine and you will be marked as mine.”

The noose tightens some more. Am I in? Do I need this that badly? Can I honestly not take Boudreau without this?

“Do you agree to all this?” she says. “Do you swear your oath to me, bind yourself to me, join with me to be by my side and protect me and my interests above all others?” She puts out her hand, fingers stretching out. “Do you agree?” she says again.

I don’t want this. Every fiber of my being tells me that this is wrong. Know that I’m fucking myself six ways to Sunday. She knows it, too. But, hey, if I’m going to fuck myself might as well go all in.

I take her hand. The skeletal fingers are dry and cool to the touch. “I do,” I say.

And fire burns through me as she brands my soul.

Chapter 24

I wake to the sound of a blaring horn, the smell of smoke and gasoline. I pick myself off the ground, road gravel embedded in my cheek, my hands scraped and raw. The light’s too bright, the air too thick. The Mercedes lies in a smashed heap behind me, a small fire in the cab, chunks of cement and metal debris scattered around it. I squint up at the freeway fifty feet above me and see the break where the car went over the side.

I’m lying on the ground in front of the car. Thrown clear? Not possible. Deposited, maybe, just to show me who’s boss. I should be dead with a steering column through my chest. Hell, maybe I was. When the sign said EXIT ONLY it had meant it.

The sunlight is too bright. My mouth tastes like smoke and blood. In a week full of headaches and gut punches, this is the worst by far. My left hand feels like it’s been slow roasted, the bandages on it tattered and blackened. I peel them off, expecting to see charred skin underneath, but it’s no worse than it was the other day.

But the wedding band is new. It would be funny if this were the tail end of a weekend bender in Vegas, but that ring is a hell of a lot scarier than waking up married to a hooker.

Legs are wobbly, hands shaking. I hobble under the freeway to a city maintenance yard through a hole in a chain-link fence.

I stumble out between a row of parked buses, half blind from the glare. The sun feels like it’s burning holes in my retinas. I close my eyes, press the heels of my hands against them. When I open them I wish I hadn’t. Pain stabs back into my skull like hot needles.

The pain is fading a little. My head’s clear enough that I can see where I’m going. Why my eyes are fucked I’ll figure out later. Right now I need to get a car and get out of here. I can already hear sirens. I turn back to the maintenance yard, spy a pickup truck on the other side. The light’s still painfully bright. Maybe I got a concussion in the crash?

I pop the pickup’s lock with a spell, go to open the door and stop short. I can see myself in the glass of the driver’s side window and besides the expected wear and tear I’m mostly okay. Except for my eyes.

They’re gone.

Pitch black marbles stare out at me from my reflection. No iris, no whites. Well, shit. She did say she’d mark me. Just didn’t think it’d be quite so obvious.

—

I’m still having trouble seeing. But it seems to be getting better. I almost crash the truck pulling out onto Figueroa as a fire truck, two cop cars and a paramedic speed by toward the crash I just left behind. I park the pickup on a side street near USC after almost sideswiping a motorcycle and taking out two kids on skateboards.

I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. Take a couple of deep breaths. I can handle this and take control. I don’t know what she’s done to me, but I’ve been thrown for loops my whole life. This is just one more thing to add to the pile.

Ten years old, summer day. Walking down an alley after buying a comic book and a pack of Now and Laters at the 7-11. Then gunshots, screaming. Watch a man get taken down in front of me as he runs out a garage.

Then he does it again. And again. And again. I watch in horror as this scene plays out in front of me, pants wet, shaking. My first Echo.

Grow up in my family you hear about magic, you learn what it is, how it works. But dealing with the Dead’s a different matter. My parents weren’t really the gutting-a-sheep-to-read-the-entrails type. Had an easier time talking to me about sex.

I do now what I did then. Accept it. Work with it. Tease it apart. I check my eyes again in the rearview mirror, but they haven’t changed. Something tells me they’re not going to. I try to pull off the wedding ring. Doesn’t budge. I’m not sure if it’s a symbol, an artifact, a reminder of my new status, or just Muerte’s fucked up sense of humor.

I lean back in the seat, close my eyes. Exhaustion threatens to overwhelm me. I need sleep and unconsciousness doesn’t count. But I don’t have time for that. I pull together a spell for wakefulness. At most it’ll be like a cup of coffee. Enough to keep me going until I can find a case of Red Bull.

I open myself up to the pool of magic around me and suddenly I’m drinking from a firehose. The shock of that much power slams into me like a 2x4. I push it back, get a handle on the flow. I’ve never felt this much power before. It’s different from when I downed that bottle of demon piss. That was like shoving a hundred gallons into a five-gallon jug. But this is different. It pours into me and I can handle it, hold onto it. Never been able to hold so much.

My brain is buzzing with it. I can feel it in my skin, my bones. Guess I don’t need that case of Red Bull after all. I think I might almost be ready to take on Boudreau.

Two hours of traffic later I stand outside Boudreau’s old house looking at the curtained-up windows, the Land Rover in the driveway, bills and letters peeking out of the overstuffed mailbox.

There’s magic here. Similar to the spells I put on the ambulance and on the name tags I use to disguise myself. Less “Don’t look at me” than “Everything’s fine, move along.” Without it the cops would be swarming over this house. The smell alone would have the neighbors running.

I can feel him in there. And I can feel all of the ghosts he’s pulled into himself, too. More than I ever could. I know who they are now, know their names, how they died. How much agony Boudreau’s putting them through. That’s one power I wish Santa Muerte had kept for herself.

I pull out a prepaid cell phone I bought at the grocery store, dial the number I got off Tabitha’s phone. And get ready to lie through my teeth.

“Well, hello sailor,” I say when it picks up.

“What do you want?” Griffin says.

“What, no ‘How ya doing?’ —‘How’s your head?’—‘Has your soul been ripped apart by a power-mad, psychotic ghost, yet?’ I’m hurt.”

“I’m hanging up.”

“But if you do that, then I won’t be able to tell you how I’m about to make your day.”

“I’m listening.”

“So, I’m standing outside a house,” I say. “Nice place. I hear it’s got a family with 2.5 kids and 3.2 dogs and everything. Very Americana. Also, and I’m just guessing from the stacked up mail and the stink of rotting flesh, they’re kinda dead.”

“So you found him. Good for you,” he says. “Why don’t you charge on in there? I’ll try to remember to thank him when he kills you.”

“Oh, I like my plan better. I’ve got two options. Option one is that I take him down, but I need some help to pull that off.”

“L.A.’s full of day laborers. Try a street corner.”

“Or,” I say, “I can go with option two. See, I’ve been talking to Ellis.”

“Ellis is dead.”

“Yeah, the dead are awful talkative around me, in case you hadn’t noticed. And boy is he a talker. You know that spell that’s kept Boudreau around so long? There’s a hole in it. It won’t let me kill him, but it will let me get control of him for a while.”

“What’s your point?”

“I can do that bit all on my own. And if I do you know where I’m gonna send him. It won’t last long and he’ll tear me apart when I lose him, but so help me I’ll have him chew through your soul like a fat man through a Vegas buffet before he does.”

“And this is supposed to make my day?”

“Yep. Because if you help me kill him I won’t have to have him kill you.”

“Hard bargain.”

“Take it or leave it.”

“All right, say I agree to this. How does it work?”

“First, we have him possess someone.”

—

I meet Griffin at a café on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills full of what pass for socialites in L.A. Impeccable hair, designer labels, conspicuous shopping bags. The hostess looks at me like she’s about to call the cops. At first I think it’s my eyes, but I’m wearing mirrored sunglasses. So it’s either my roguish good looks or the fact that I look like I’ve been through a mulcher.

“I’m here to see him,” I say, pointing at Griffin sitting alone at a nearby table. I push the sunglasses a little higher up on my nose to better hide my eyes. Griffin stands, nods his head. The hostess isn’t convinced, but walks me over to the table, anyway.

“I didn’t think it was possible,” Griffin says, “but you actually look worse today.”

Griffin had suggested we meet at his house. I told him to go fuck himself. I wanted public and busy. He’d either shoot me to get me out of the way or try to beat how to control Boudreau out of me. And after he figured out I was blowing smoke up his ass then he’d shoot me. Pretty much a lose-lose situation all the way around.

“Been burning the midnight oil,” I say.

“So I gathered,” he says. “Tell me.”

Time to start dancing. I tell him what’s happened. Most of it, anyway. The hospital, Ellis being possessed. I leave Alex and Vivian out of it.

I keep the story as wide and vague as I can. Enough room, I hope, to slide some whopper lies in here and there.

“When we got there Ellis was still just Ellis. Conscious, but just barely. Then Boudreau popped up. Tried to possess him.”

“Did he succeed?”

I nod. “Funny thing about that, though. Right before he moved in, all those ghosts he’d been piling onto himself did a runner.”

“Really.” He leans forward, hooked.

While I’m shoveling bullshit like I’m fertilizing crops, I catch a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of two of Griffin’s men I hadn’t seen when I came in. Booth in the back. Clear line of fire. Either to protect him or shoot me. I’ll know in a little while, I guess.

“Yeah. Even if I’d been ready for it, I don’t think I could have taken him. But you and me together? I think we have a shot.”

He leans back. Thinking. “What happened to Ellis?”

“I shot him,” I say.

“You killed him?” Griffin says, somewhere between impressed and appalled.