One-Eyed Jack (4 page)

She enjoyed the hunt a little too much. But who but a madwoman would have drained
my
living body and made me hers? Just fetching my corpse from the grave—

“I’m hungry,” she complained. I sharpened my teeth on my lip to stop a malicious smile.

If I could buy a little time, the girls might make it to the street and I could lose them in the crowds and tangled shadows of the gaslamp district. Footsteps receded down the alley; I spread my hands in protest, cocking my head to one side and giving her the little half-smile that used to work so well on my wife. “Something with a little more fight in it, sweetie.”

My wife was a hell of a lot younger than Sycorax. “Those two girls. Bring me their blood, Tribute. That’s an order.”

And that was the end of the argument. I turned to obey.

“Tribute.”

Coming back around slowly, her gaze—catching mine—flat and pale. “Sycorax.”

“I could spike your pretty eyes out on my pinkie finger and eat them, lovely boy,” she purred. “Hazel, aren’t they?”

“Blue.”

She shrugged and made an irritated, dismissive gesture, hands white as wax. “It’s so hard to tell in the dark.”

The girls made it to the street before Sycorax ended the discussion, but I had to follow them anyway. I paced my ordained prey, staying to the shadows, the collar of the black leather trench coat that Sycorax had picked out for me tugged up to half-hide the outline of my jaw. I never would have bought that coat for myself. You’d think anybody who’d been dead for any time at all would have had enough of blackness and shadows. Sycorax reveled in them. If she were three hundred years younger, she’d have been a gothchick.

It was a good night: nobody turned for a second look.

People are always dying, and human memory is short. In a hundred years, I will probably be able to walk down any street in the world without raising an eyebrow.

As long as the sun is down.

Sycorax didn’t bother to follow. I had no choice but to do as I was bid. It’s more than a rule; it’s a fact. I expected there were still a few women who would get a kick out of that.

My girls staggered somewhat, weaving. One was a blonde, brittle dyed hair and a red beret. The other one had glossy chestnut brown waves and the profile of a little girl. I tracked them through the district toward the ocean, neon glow, and littered sidewalks. A door would open and music would issue forth, and it wasn’t long before I found myself mouthing the words to one particular song.

There’s something gloriously ironic in a man charting a number-one hit twenty-five years after he’s dead.
Otis Redding, eat your heart out.

My quarry paused at an open-air patio where a live band played the blues. Girl singer, open coat, and a spill of curls like wicked midnight: performing old standards, the kind I’ve always loved.
Mama, tell my baby sister, not to do what I have done. I’ll spend my life in sin and misery, in the House of the Rising Sun.
A song that was already venerable when Eric Burdon made it famous.

There’s all kinds of whoredom, aren’t there? And all kinds of bloodsuckers, too.

The singer nailed “Amazing Grace” a capella like heartbreak, voice sharp and gritty as little Mary Johnson doing “Cold, Cold Heart.” I caught myself singing along and slashed my tongue with needle teeth before someone could overhear. Still no blood. I hadn’t fed in a long time and it hurt more than it should have.

The girls sat down at a table and ordered food. I smelled beer, hot wings, eye-watering garlic. I suddenly very badly wanted a peanut butter sandwich and a milkshake.

Leaning against the high black iron fence, I watched the girls watching the band until a passerby in her fifties turned to get a startled better look at me. I stood up straight and met her gaze directly, giving her the crooked little-kid smile. It almost always works, except on Sycorax.

Trying to hide your face only convinces them they’ve seen something.

“Sorry,” she said, waving me away with a smile. A moment later, she turned back. “You know you look like . . . ”

“People say,” I answered, pitching my voice high.

“Amazing.” She nodded cheerfully, gave me a wide wondering grin, and continued on her way. I watched her go, chattering with her friends, shaking their heads.

The girls didn’t stay for “King of the Road,” although I would have liked to hear the singer’s version.

Kids.

I almost turned away when they walked past. They stank of garlic-stuffed mushrooms and beer. The reek of the herb knotted my stomach and seared my eyes. I actually tried to take a half-step in another direction before the compulsion Sycorax had laid on me locked my knees and forced me back into pursuit.

They walked arm in arm, skinny twenty-year-olds with fake ID and black vinyl miniskirts. Cheap boots, too much eyeliner. The one with the brown hair broke my heart every time she tossed her head, just that way. I let myself drift ahead of them, taking a gamble on where they would cut across the residential neighborhood near the ocean: a dangerous place for girls to be.

I ducked down a side street to cut them off and waited in the dark of an unlit doorway. Sycorax’s control permitted that much. I leaned against the wall, scrubbing my face against my hands. It felt like a waxen mask, cold and stiff. My hands weren’t much better.

“Better you should go step in front of the Coaster, bro,” Jesse said, a transparent figure gesturing with long hands toward the tracks and the commuter train. I ignored him.

I couldn’t have done it anyway. Sycorax had given me other orders. And besides, I had a plan.

They didn’t take long to catch up with me. I was unlucky; they picked the better of the two routes through the brownstones, the one I had been able to justify choosing, and just that innocently chose their fate.

The scent of bougainvillea and jacaranda filled the spaces of the night. I watched them skipping from streetlight to streetlight, shadows stretched out behind them, catching up, and then reaching before. The brown-haired one walked a few steps ahead of the bleach-blonde, humming to herself.

I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t one of my standards, but every blues singer born knows the words to that one. Hell, I used to have a horse by that name.

I picked up the tune.

I had to.

“ . . . they call the Rising Sun. It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy. And me, O God, I’m one!”

Their heads snapped up. Twenty, maybe. I was dead before they were born. Gratifying that they recognized my voice.

“Fellas, don’t believe what a bad woman tells you—though her eyes be blue, or brown . . . ” I strolled out of the shadows, ducking my head and smiling, letting the words trail away.

The dark-haired girl did a doubletake. She had a lovely nose, pert and turned up. The blonde blinked a couple of times, but I don’t think she made the connection. I’d changed my appearance some, stopped dying my hair black, and I’d lost a lot of weight.

The stench of garlic on their breath would have thickened my blood in my veins—if I had any left. I swallowed hard, remembering all those songs about wandering ghosts and unquiet graves. Ghosts that all seem to want the same thing: revenge, and to lie down and rest.

I smiled wider.
What the lady wants, the lady gets.

“Oh, wow,” the darker girl said. “Do you have any idea how much you look like . . . ”

The street was empty, dark and deserted. I came up under the streetlight, close enough to reach out and touch the tip of that nose if I wanted. I dropped them a look that used to melt hearts, sidelong glance under lowered lashes. “People say,” I answered.

And, sick to my stomach, I broke their necks before I fed.

It was the least I could do.

Poison roiled in my belly when I laid them out gently in the light of that streetlamp, in the rich dark covering the waterfront, close enough to smell the sea. I straightened their spines so they wouldn’t look so terrible for whoever found them, but at least
they
wouldn’t be coming back.

It was happening: my limbs jerked and shook. My flesh crawled with ripples like fire, my tongue numb as a drunk’s.
I’m going back to New Orleans, to wear that ball and chain . . .

Not this time. Struggling to smooth each step, to hide the venom flooding my veins, I hurried back to my poor,
hungry
mistress. I stole the brunette’s wallet. I stopped and bought breath mints at the all-night grocery.

I beat Sycorax home.

One-Eyed Jack and the Fallen Angel.

Las Vegas, Summer, 2002.

The trooper shone his light around the cab and the bed of the truck, but didn’t make us get out despite 3:00 a.m. and no excuse to be out but stargazing at Willow Beach. Right after the terrorist attacks, it was soldiers armed with automatic weapons. I’m not sure if the Nevada Highway Patrol are an improvement, but this is the world we have to live in, even if it is under siege. Stewart, driving, smiled and showed ID, and then we passed through winding gullies and out onto the Dam.

It was uncrowded in the breathless summer night. The massive lights painting its facade washed the stars out of the desert sky. Despite the mountains between here and there, Las Vegas glowed in the passenger-side mirror as Stewart parked the truck on the Arizona side. On an overcast night, the glow is greenish—the reflected lights of the MGM Grand. That night we had clear skies, and it was the familiar city-glow pink, only brighter and split asymmetrically by the ascending Luxor light like a beacon calling someone home.

I’d been chewing my thumb all evening. Stewart rattled my shoulder to get me to look up. “We’re here. Bring your chisel?”

“Better,” I said, and reached behind the seat to bring out the tire iron and a little eight-pound sledge. The sledge dropped neatly into the tool loop of my cargo pants. I tugged a black denim jacket on over the torn shirt and slid the iron into the left-hand sleeve. “Now I’m ready.”

He disarmed the doors and struggled out of the leather jacket I’d told him was too hot to wear. “Why you always gotta break things you don’t understand?”

I didn’t ask for this job. I didn’t go looking for this job, and I sure as hell didn’t get to pick my father, or the way his blood linked me to Nevada, or the way he paid my mother off and sent her south out of Carson City when her belly proved an embarrassment. Or the magic that rose up and bound me to a newborn city.

No.

I got to pick the manner of my death, however. And apparently that’s enough for the fates.

They have a sense of humor.

“Because they scare me.” I didn’t think he’d get it, but he was still sitting behind the wheel thinking when I walked around and opened his door. The alarm had rearmed; it wailed momentarily but he keyed it off in irritation and hopped down, tossing the jacket inside. “It’s got to relate to how bad things have gotten. It’s a shadow war, man. This Dam is
for
something.”

“Of course it’s for something.” Walking beside me, he shot me that blue-eyed look that made me want to smack him and kiss him all at once. “You know what they used to say about the Colorado before they built it—too thick to drink, and too thin to plow. The Dam is there to screw up the breeding cycles of fish, make it possible for men to live where men shouldn’t be living. Make a reservoir. Hydroelectric power. Let the mud settle out. It’s there to hold the river back.”

It’s there to hold the river back.
“I was thinking just that earlier,” I said as we walked across the floodlit Dam. The same young girl from that afternoon leaned out over the railing, looking down into the yawning, floodlit chasm. I wondered if she was homeless and how she’d gotten all the way out here—and how she planned to get back.

She looked up as we walked past arm in arm, something reflected like city glow in her eyes.

The lure of innocence to decadence cuts both ways: cities and angels, vampires and victims. Sweet-eyed street kid with a heart like a knife. I didn’t even need to flip up my eyepatch to know for sure. “What’s your name?” I let the tire iron slip down in my sleeve where I could grab it. “Goddess leave you behind?”

“Goddess works for me,” she said, and raised her right fist. A shiny little automatic glittered in it, all blued steel with a viper nose. It made a 40’s movie tableau, even to the silhouetting spill of floodlights and the way the wind pinned the dress to her body. She smiled. Sweet, venomous. “And you can call me Angel. Drop the crowbar, kid.”

“It’s a tire iron,” I answered, but I let it fall to the cement. It rang like the bell going off in my head, telling me everything made perfect sense. “What the hell do you want with Las Vegas, Angel?” I thought I knew all the West-coast animae.
She must be new.

She giggled prettily. “Look at you, cutie. Just as proud of your little shadow city as if it really existed.”

I wished I still had the tire iron in my hand. I would have broken it across her face.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Stewart. Bless him. He jerked his thumb up at the spill of light smirching the sky. “What do you call that?”

She shrugged. “A mirage shines too, but you can’t touch it. All you need to know is quit trying to break my Dam. You must be Jack, right? And this charming fellow here—” she took a step back so the pistol still covered both of us, even as Stewart dropped my hand and edged away.
Stewart.
“—This must be the Suicide King. I’d like you both to work for me too.”

The gun oscillated from Stewart’s midsection to mine. Angel’s hand wasn’t shaking. Behind her, Goddess strode up the sidewalk, imperious in five-hundred-dollar high-heeled shoes.

“I know what happens,” I said. “All that darkness has to go somewhere, doesn’t it? Everything trapped behind the Dam. All the little ways my city echoes yours, and the big ones too. And Nevada has a way of sucking things up without a trace. The Dam is a way to control it. You sink it all into Vegas until you want it.”

Stewart picked up the thread as Goddess pulled a little pearl-handled gun out of her pocketbook. He didn’t step forward, but I felt him interpose himself.
Don’t! Don’t.
“Let me guess,” he said. “
The early part of 2100
? What happens then?”