Harvest Moon (32 page)

“Your arrogance is magnificent.”

I shrugged. “It's not arrogance if you can back it up.”

“And you're convinced you can back it up.”

“Oh, yeah. See, the scrub in the stories was a coward.”

“A coward?” Samael grinned and bent an eyebrow at me.

“Yeah. He really only had two claims to fame. He slaughtered a bunch of Egyptian children—everyone knows that one. And he attacked Jacob when he was still a babe in his mother's womb—and he didn't even win
that
fight, by the way. So maybe he always wanted to be the badass they called in when a baby needed killing. But he never really amounted to more than a tale mothers told to frighten their children. Like I said, a bogeyman.”

Samael's eyes flashed and his face darkened momentarily, and then the grin returned. “Ah, yes, the false bravado of the damned,” he said. “No matter how many times I see it, it never fails to amuse me. I hope you can cling to it, at the end.” Then he vanished, and the book he'd been holding toppled onto the floorboard.

I enjoyed the rest of my drive in blessed silence.

 

The place where I'd executed Benny looked much the same as I'd left it, including the glazed and blackened Benny-shaped scar at the center of the intersection.

It wasn't really necessary for me to do what I meant to do at the crossroads. But magic is ultimately all about patterns, about convergences, intersections, and associations. I'd be able to draw more power in this place, and as the site of Benny's death curse, it should be nicely attuned to Samael. It had other associations for me besides.

I left the Lincoln's headlights on to illuminate my work and gathered my supplies. I placed the TV in the middle of the road leading east from the intersection and switched it on. Electricity wasn't necessary—I only kept the set plugged in at my condo so Mr. Clean could watch the local channels. The jinn surveyed his
surroundings, looking from side to side as if peering through a window.

“Have you decided to release me?”

“No such luck, Mr. Clean.”

“My name is Abishanizad.”

“Your parents must have hated you.”

“Why have you brought me here?”

I momentarily considered asking the jinn to help with the manual labor, but finally decided it wouldn't be worth the negotiating.

“Hold on to your shorts,” I said. “I'll let you know when I need you.”

I began collecting stones from the desert, each about the size of a dinner plate. I didn't much care about shape or texture—some were round, some were flat, some were rough, and some were smooth. I placed them in four separate rows, each at a forty-five-degree angle between the roads. It took a lot of rocks, but the result was a kind of Paleolithic geomorph like the spokes of a giant wheel, with the hub at the intersection of the crossroads.

When I'd joined the outfit, my boss, Shanar Rashan, had brought me into the desert not far from this place to summon my familiar. That was the other association I could work with, and it's why the jinn had been hoping for an early parole when he saw where I'd taken him.

I had experience with exactly one spirit, Mr. Clean. I had a spell that had given me power over him. I had no idea if Samael was the same kind of entity as Mr. Clean, but I had no reason to think he wasn't. I was going to work with that.

I retrieved the plastic angel statuette and half buried it in the center of the crossroads, in the place where I'd
killed Benny and burned his corpse. Then I went to stand in the middle of the west road, the same distance from the intersection as the spot where Mr. Clean was positioned. The moon hung low on the horizon, like a swollen yellow eye watching my preparations.

“Juice up, Mr. Clean,” I called to the jinn. “I need all you can give me.” One of the primary roles of any familiar is to flow a little extra juice for its master. A normal familiar could flow a little extra—Mr. Clean could flow a lot. I expected to need all of it. The real question was whether it would kill me.

When I'd summoned the jinn all those years before, I'd had no idea what to expect. It was my coming-out party as a young sorceress. It was a way of announcing myself to the unseen world, letting it take its measure of me and commanding its respect. I'd called out blindly to the darkness and Mr. Clean had answered.

This time, I'd be calling to Samael. That's why I was performing the ritual in the place where the death curse had manifested him. That was the purpose for the angel statuette. It wasn't just a subtle jab, though it was that, too—it was a way of crafting a connection, an association, between the entity, the magic, and me.

I began the chant at a whisper, just as I had when I was a girl. My mind emptied until it was a hollow chamber filled only with the words, and the pattern behind the words. I stretched out my arms and called the untamed magic of the wasteland to me, and it coursed along the four roads like a torrent. The stones of my geomorph began to glow with an orange radiance, like jack-o'-lanterns on Halloween.

“Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night,” I chanted. “What immortal hand or eye could
frame thy fearful symmetry?” I'd never been much for poetry, but this verse had always held power for me, from the first time I'd heard it. When Rashan had taught me the summoning ritual, I'd known these were the words I would use to master it. When you're really on your game, magic feels
right
.

As the words gained volume, a hot wind blew in from the desert and lifted the hair from my shoulders. The wasteland itself awoke from its long slumber, and it
breathed
. Dark clouds rolled in and a bolt of lightning flashed down from the cloudless sky. It struck the center of the crossroads and the angel statuette was illuminated with electric-blue witch-light.

I took that power into me, all of it, and I reached out to Mr. Clean to take his as well. He screamed as I violated him, gorging myself on his magic like a vampire at a soft, wet throat.

“Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,” I shouted into the roar of the wind and the maelstrom of magic.

And Samael came.

Black smoke roiled in along all four roads to converge in the center of the intersection. A form appeared, like a hard-edged darkness against the night, a hundred feet tall. I saw a ragged outline, snapping like the folds of a tattered robe, or maybe just a jagged tear in the world that opened onto another place, a place of unrelenting blackness.

The towering form gained solidity and details began to emerge. The figure held a massive iron sword and wore an iron crown. The face was in shadow, but I could tell that it looked upon me because the body was covered with hundreds, thousands, of eyes, each peer
ing out at me from the darkness when the folds of the cloak shifted, never blinking.

The maelstrom I had created turned at the center of the crossroads, drawing this being down into the statuette. Like Abishanizad, a spirit of earth and air as old as the world, it would be caught in that relentless pull and be bound to the plastic angel. I would imprison it by my will and power and make it my slave.

Or not.

Samael spoke, and hearing his voice was like stroking out. My head exploded, my body lost all feeling, and I collapsed to the ground, utterly paralyzed.

“I am called Samael,” he said. “I am sorrow and loss. I serve the God on the Mountain and you have no power over me.” He lifted the iron sword and brought it down on the angel statuette. The blow didn't so much cleave it as vaporize it, and the dust was scattered on the raging wind.

The figure turned and a thousand eyes looked down at me where I lay prostrated in the dirt. And what I felt wasn't fear, it was despair. It was the abject hopelessness that one can only experience when death is inevitable and only oblivion awaits.

Samael was the Old Testament made manifest. My own faith, such as it was, was built upon that ancient foundation, but it was mostly about the possibility of salvation from it, through grace and redemption. There was no redemption here. There was only wrath and punishment. There was only retribution.

The towering figure of the Angel of Death vanished and was replaced by Samael's human form. The wind died as suddenly as it had risen and the night sky cleared. Samael walked over to me and crouched on his
haunches. Strength gradually returned to my body and I struggled to sit up.

Samael grinned at me. “Let's hear it,” he said.

“Hear what?” I gasped, fighting to pull the air back into my lungs.

“A snappy one-liner. A sarcastic gibe. You know, talk a little trash.”

I laughed bitterly, shaking my head. “What do you call it? The ‘bravado of the damned'? You've heard it a thousand times, and you still don't understand it.”

“It's nothing more than impudence. It's pride.” Samael paused, and then spat out a single word. “Sin.”

I shook my head again. “No. You're stronger than I am. Fine. Maybe you'll kill me in a couple days and there's nothing I can do about it. Too bad for me.”

“At least you've come to accept your fate.”

“But why? Is it because you've earned your strength? Is it because you've worked for your power? Is it even the luck of the draw? Hell, no. The fucking game is rigged. Someone decided that you'd be stronger than me, that you'd have the power of life and death over me, so that's the way it is. Okay, no use crying about it. But don't expect me to be impressed. You haven't done anything to earn my respect. You're a fucking tool.”

“It's the same in your world. You expected Benny to respect you, just because you had more power.”

“Bullshit.
That's
the luck of the draw. Benny and I are the same. We're both human. So maybe I've got more juice than Benny, and maybe my boss has more than me. All men aren't created equal, at least in the underworld. We accept that. But at least the deck wasn't stacked ahead of the game.”

Samael laughed. “You think it's random?”

“I know it is.”

“And yet, you must know that magic is the pattern within the fabric. You must know this, or you would have no command over it.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, and shrugged. I'd been philosophizing on precisely that subject as I set up the summoning ritual.

“So you know that magic is pattern, and yet you believe that the gift of it is random, without pattern? Do you not sense a contradiction in that? That everything else about magic is pattern, order, but those who are given to command it are not chosen, but are only a product of chance?”

That brought me up short. I'd never considered it because it just didn't fit my worldview. I didn't want to believe I was chosen for anything. I didn't want to believe anyone could make choices for me but me. If I wasn't the master of myself and my fate, what was I, really?

Samael nodded. “
That
is the question that should keep you up at night,” he said. “It has haunted me since I was made. What if there is
only
the pattern, the purpose? What if ‘I' am only an illusion, a trick of the light? You said I was a tool. What if the ‘I' is just the by-product of a tool aware of itself?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “There's no pattern or purpose behind everything, and even if there is, I don't figure in it. You want to know how I know that?”

Samael nodded, and I punched him in the nose. He reeled back, lost his balance, and toppled onto the sand.

“What the fuck?” he said, sitting up and gingerly prodding his nose. A trickle of blood ran down over his lip.

I laughed. “Didn't see that coming, did you? I believe in magic because I can see it. I can taste it and touch it. I can feel that pattern and weave it into a new one if I want to. I
don't
see that pattern in my life. I'm not feeling it. You want me to believe in it, show me. Until then, I'm not going to take the word of some spook with delusions of grandeur and an identity crisis to match.”

Samael wiped the blood on the back of his hand and shook his head, smiling ruefully. We stood and faced each other. “I envy you,” he said.

“Why? You've got the juice and the big-ass sword. I'm a mere mortal.”

“That's exactly why I envy you. I
have
seen it, Domino. The pattern. I've seen more of it than you, anyway, enough that I can't just shut my eyes, wave my hand, and make it go away.”

I looked at him closely. I'd gotten pretty good over the years at sensing when someone was holding out on me. “What else?” I asked. “That's not all of it.”

He nodded. “I envy you because you may be right. I'm just a tool, but humans may not be. I don't know that you are, and I wish I had that. The rest of us are like insects caught in a spiderweb, but some of my kind believe that humans are free of it, for better or worse.”

“Ignorance is bliss,” I said.

“Amen,” said Samael.

“Now that we've shared our existential angst, I don't suppose this changes anything?”

“It changes everything.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I'm still going to kill you in two days. But up to the end, you'll believe you're dying free.”

 

The next morning, I went to East L.A. to meet with Rafael Chavez. Carmen Leeds had been found dead, just as Samael had said she would be. Worse yet, Jefferson Alexander seemed determined to secede from the outfit, and it looked like his crew was behind him. Two murders in the organization in as many days was enough trouble—a civil war would be really bad for business.

I met Chavez in an outfit-controlled tattoo parlor. We had a lot of them all over our territory. Tattoos were powerful mojo, and the operation, though small in scale, worked on multiple levels. First, a lot of gangsters used tattoos to enhance their ability to flow and store juice. In theory, they worked just like any other kind of arcane symbology, from graffiti to old-school glyphs and runes. In fact, they were even more potent because they were permanently etched in the sorcerer's skin and paid for in blood and pain.