Harvest Moon (38 page)

I had to give Alexander credit—there weren't many gangsters with some juice who were crazy enough to back him against me, not to mention my boss. But he'd found them. There was a moment in which no one moved and time itself seemed to take a coffee break. Then I felt magic being sucked from the room like air from a burning building, and the Salvadorans unleashed hell on my ass.

They'd obviously fought together before, because their attacks were coordinated. The two in front targeted my defenses. One went after my talismans with magic-eating juice while the other hit me with a chaos spell designed to short-circuit any active protections I might try to spin. The two in back went on the offensive, lashing out at me with elemental and kinetic energy.

All of this happened at once, in the space between breaths. In the moment before this malevolent magic crashed over me like a tsunami, my familiar appeared in the middle of the theater, standing like his namesake with his arms crossed over his barrel chest.

“Take it all, Mr. Clean,” I said.

The jinn spun in place and became a whirlwind, and the maelstrom sucked the hostile magic from the air and devoured it. The wind howled and shrieked and I had to brace myself to keep from being taken by the vortex.

“Kill them,” I said, and the jinn tore into the Salvadorans, smashing bone and tearing flesh in a frenzy born of years of imprisonment and syndicated reruns.

I turned to Alexander. He was watching the carnage
in stunned disbelief, slowly backing away toward the exit door. He saw me and a look of determination and defiance hardened his features.

“You do anything to me and KZ dies,” he said, shouting to be heard above the roaring wind.

I smiled and hit Alexander's circle with my own chaos spell, overloading his weak-ass magic and pulling the deadly pattern apart at the seams. The wards collapsed in on themselves and the liberated juice was caught by the raging whirlwind and consumed. The wind died and Mr. Clean reappeared, standing with arms crossed once again at the back of the theater.

“Time to man up, Jefferson,” I said. “I've really been looking forward to this.”

Whether because he actually had some balls or he was up against the wall and knew it, Alexander came to play. He advanced and started spinning spontaneous combat spells, alternately pounding my defenses and exploring them for weaknesses in a sophisticated attack routine. The guy had some juice, even if he was a prick.

I backpedaled and countered his attacks. Alexander maintained the barrage, relentless, pulling more juice, hammering against my will with a power born of desperation. I had to admit, I'd probably underestimated the fucking guy.

I stayed with the rope-a-dope until I sensed Alexander tiring. I was just about to bring the pain when Detective Meadows appeared out of nowhere. “Police! Down on the ground!” she yelled, her revolver aimed at Alexander in a two-handed police grip. “Now!”

The conflagration of magic dissipated and died as Alexander and I both turned to look at her. He didn't
turn his head from the detective, but I saw Alexander's eyes swivel to me.

“No fucking way,” he said, and laughed. Alexander extended his arm toward Meadows. The gun quivered, and then shook. Slowly, her arm bent until the gun's barrel was pressed under her chin. Her body tensed and froze.

“Meadows, what the fuck are you doing here?” It was stupid, but I was too stunned to think straight.

“I followed you,” she said, looking over at me out of the corner of her eye. “I thought you'd lead me to Rashan.”

Alexander looked from the detective to me. “You two know each other? And she knows about the boss?” He laughed again and shook his head.

“Let her go,” I said. “Don't dig yourself in any deeper, Jefferson.”

“Fuck me, she's a cop, Domino! And you actually care, don't you?”

“Yeah, maybe I do.” I flung out my hand and the revolver was torn from the detective's grip, tumbling through the air to clatter off the far wall. I flicked my wrist and Meadows was hurled backward, flipping over the first row of seats and out of sight.

I spun my chaining spell, and iron bands of force enfolded Alexander, wrapping him in a lethal embrace. I squeezed, forcing the air from his lungs. He couldn't move and couldn't speak. He couldn't flow any juice and couldn't spin a spell. He was at my mercy.

I approached until we were standing nose to nose. His eyes bulged and veins stood out on his forehead and temples. His face was turning a blotchy reddish-purple. I held the chaining spell steady and pulled in
more juice. I'd made a mistake with Benny Ben-Reuven, and I didn't plan to make it twice.

“If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything,” I said. I thrust my own will deep inside Alexander's mind. A squeal escaped his lips and his body jerked and tensed. He fought me and I dug in deeper, the spell slicing through his consciousness like a lobotomist's knife.

The mistake I'd made with Benny is I'd believed him when he said no one else was behind him. I'd believed him because it was the simplest explanation for the attack. It hadn't been well planned. Benny had just waited for an opportunity when we were alone, and then he'd tried to shoot me in the head. It hadn't looked to me like he'd given it much thought at all, and that fit with what I knew about Benny.

Deep inside Alexander's mind, I found the truth. The hit
had
been planned, it just hadn't been planned by Benny. He'd learned about Benny's death curse and coveted it. Benny had insisted it wasn't for
goyim,
so Alexander came up with a way to use it for his own ends. He began planting suggestions in Benny's mind—some with juice and some without, but always with the idea that Benny had to make a play to move up in the organization. He found Benny's not-so-deep-seated misogyny, and he worked with that, too, worrying and picking at it until it nagged Benny like an angry boil that wouldn't go away.

Alexander had done all this with the idea that Benny would eventually take a shot at me. He didn't know how Benny would do it and didn't really care. He knew it wouldn't work, and he knew I'd kill Benny for it. Then the death curse would come down on me, and the or
ganizational ladder would be open, two rungs ahead of Alexander.

If it had ended there, his hands would be clean— Benny and I would have done all his dirty work for him. But that wasn't enough for him. Alexander had to kill Carmen Leeds, and he couldn't make it look like anyone else was behind that murder. He hadn't realized he'd have to deal with me, however temporarily. He thought the curse would take me as soon as I smoked Benny, and that would give him a free shot at Leeds.

I probed around in all the dark corners of Alexander's ugly little mind until I was sure the scheme ended with him. His crew had come along with him, but mostly because they didn't know what he was up to. All they knew was that I'd killed their boss and brought in someone from the outside to replace him. Alexander convinced them I was trying to break up the crew because it had become too successful, too powerful. Alexander had brought in the Salvadorans as insurance, but that was just the beginning. After he took my job, his plan was to purge the ranks of any disloyal elements and replace them with more of the killers from Pico Union.

I dropped the spell and retreated inside my own head. I held the chaining spell on Alexander and cranked the vise a little tighter, just because. Then I balled my fist, took a step back, and punched him in the mouth. I put a little juice into it and his jaw shattered.

I turned to Detective Meadows. She'd peeled herself off the theater floor and was slouched in one of the seats in the first row. She saw the way I was looking at her and held up her hands.

“I know,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn't have followed you.”

“Yeah, maybe not. I told you, Meadows. You keep it up, you're going to get hurt.”

“I'm a cop. What am I supposed to do, ignore my job?”

I shook my head. “This isn't your job. This is my job. Your job is out there with all the normal criminals.”

Meadows shook her head. “None of that matters,” she said. “What difference does it make if I get the bad guys off the street if I can't even touch the
really
bad guys?”

I looked at her for a moment before speaking. “When I was a little girl,” I said, “a man tried to rape me.” Meadows tried to speak, but I waved her off. “I had the power to stop him. I could protect myself. Most children can't. Most moms and dads can't, either. That's your job.”

“Because you're not going to do it,” Meadows said. It was an accusation.

“That's right,” I said. “Because I'm a bad guy, too.”

“You're not a bad guy, Riley. Maybe you need to think you are.”

“Maybe. But I'm not one of the good guys, either.”

Meadows nodded. She got up and went to retrieve her revolver, returning it to the holster clipped at her belt. She turned and looked at me once more, and then she left.

I dragged Alexander's unconscious body out to my car and threw him in the trunk. Then I banished Mr. Clean once again to the Zenith in the backseat. I got the idea the jinn had thoroughly enjoyed the evening's work. It wasn't in him to do a job for free, though, and
his assistance in the fight had come at an unspeakable price. I'd need to brush up on my knowledge of essential oils.

 

I drove into the desert for what was likely to be the last time. Samael didn't appear to keep me company, which was just as well because I wasn't sure I had any of the bravado of the damned left in me.

I'd made arrangements with Chavez and he knew what to do if I didn't come back. I'd recommended him to take my place as lieutenant. He deserved it, but it would be Shanar Rashan's decision in the end. For his part, Chavez was ready to put together a posse and go after Samael the old-fashioned way. I vetoed that idea. I didn't want the death curse to decimate the outfit. I was all about organizational best practices, right up to the end.

When I reached the crossroads, I got out of the car and sat in the dirt in the middle of the intersection. The moon was full and the magic of that wild place was thick enough to raise the hair on my arms. Even the roads were transformed in the moonlight, appearing to my witch sight like ancient rivers rather than something carved from the desert by the hands of men. Before long, Benny's ghost appeared.

He turned a full circle, looking out at the desert. He looked up at the moon. “Has it really only been three days?” he asked. “There's no sense of time here. It could have been a hundred years.”

“Just three days,” I said. “But it was a long fucking three days.”

“Why are you here? Have you come to beg for your life?”

I laughed. “No such luck, Benny. I'm here because this is where I want to die.”

“Why? You'll be trapped here, just like I am.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I'll be trapped here. With you. It'll be like a steel-cage death-match. We'll have a lot of time to work out our disagreement.”

Benny's eyes widened and he shook his head. “No! I'm protected from you.”

“No, Benny, you
prayed
for protection from me. That's not really the same thing, is it? Like they say, God always answers prayers, but sometimes the answer is no. You had enough juice to kill me—props for that—but you don't have enough juice to save yourself from the things I'll do to you once I'm dead.”

The ghost started stumbling around in ragged circles, fading in and out of view as he searched futilely for a way to escape the crossroads. I just watched him and after a time he accepted the inevitable. He stood and faced me again.

“What do you want?”

“A sit-down, what else?”

Benny nodded. “Okay. I'm listening.”

“We got played, Benny—both of us.” I spelled out Alexander's scheme for him. Benny got angrier the longer I spoke. His spectral image flickered and faded in and out as he lost his grip on the world of the living.

“That motherfucker,” Benny said when I'd finished. “He made me do it, Domino! He made me take a shot at you!”

“It's a little late to cover your ass, Benny. Alexander maybe gave you the idea, encouraged you a little, but it wouldn't have worked if you didn't want to do it.” Benny started to protest, but I held up my hands, cut
ting him off. “It's on me, too, Benny. Like I said that night, I didn't really mind killing you. I just did what we do. I didn't think it through.”

Benny's ghost stared up at the sky again and sighed. “You know the weirdest thing about being dead? I always heard ghosts hated the living, like they were jealous of them because they were still alive.”

“You're not?”

“Fuck, no. Now that I'm dead, I don't see much point in being alive in the first place.”

“That sucks, Benny.”

“I mean, what's the difference? When you're alive, it seems like the most important thing in the world, but what does it matter, really? There was an inscription I heard about, it was on a Roman tomb or some shit. It said, ‘I was not. I was. I am not. I care not.' I always thought, what kind of fucking attitude is that, you know? Turns out, that shit was proper wisdom, Domino.”

“I don't know, Benny, maybe it's something only ghosts and Romans got figured out. I still care.”

He looked at me and his image wavered again. “You do, don't you? You still want to live.”

“Sure I do,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck. “The last three days, I haven't been thinking about much else.”

“You want me to pull the contract.”

“Yeah, that's what I want,” I said.

“What's in it for me?”

I shrugged. “Well, if you don't, I'm going to stay here and spend some time with you, Benny. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to convince you it's better to be alive.”