Finally, he blasts my shield dome into a million pieces of formless aether. A guy like this with lots of showy magic tends to forget the basics of fighting. The physical part. I rush him and get a hand around his throat before he can throw any more hexes.
Cale’s boys just stand there like pricy mannequins. It’s the girls who finally do something and make to throw some hoodoo my way. Candy is on them before either of them can get more than a syllable out. She puts the boot to them, but has enough control of herself not to go Jade on them.
I let go of Cale long enough for him to take a swing at me. Then I speak a single Hellion word.
He collapses. Not like he fell. More like a giant invisible foot from the sky is trying to squash him like a bug. He fights it, writhing and twisting. Almost pushing himself up on two arms and then collapsing again. His face is a few inches from the street when he starts vomiting blood. Some of it splashes onto his face and his bleached white hair. Cale’s crew freezes. They don’t run, but they don’t try to help him either. Blood does that to people. I let him keep vomiting. In fact, I make him vomit more blood than any ten human bodies could possibly hold. Gallons and gallons of it. It spreads in a widening puddle in the street, covering him and threatening to touch his crew’s expensive shoes. They want to stop the mayhem, but they’re torn between their loyalty to their leader and their look.
One of the girls, Cale’s squeeze I guess by her haughty high-toned look, rushes to his aid, but slips and ends up on her ass in the gooey red slip-and-slide pouring from her boyfriend’s mouth.
I can hear the electronic beeps and boops of people dialing cell phones. Good citizens calling 911. I shout a bit of mind-control abracadabra. It’s something you use on people and hell beasts, but it does weird things to electronics. I once blew out all the traffic lights on Hollywood Boulevard with it when I drove Allegra to Doc Kinski’s clinic. This time it just fries some smartphones.
I let up on Cale. He can’t breathe while puking and I don’t want him to die of oxygen deprivation. The moment the blood stops, he sucks in big mouthfuls of air.
“Hurting your boss here is fun, but only one of you pricks is goeatpricks ing home alive, and it’s the one who names your Akira supplier. The one who makes it. Just shout out a name and address and you get to walk away.”
One of the boys who’s gone even paler than when he came out of the club waves a bony arm in the air like a drunk praying mantis.
“It’s Hunahpu,” he says. “He runs the cookers.”
“Where can I find him?”
“Shut your fucking mouth, Jonas.”
It’s Cale, still on the ground, but still in command. His latex glistens with blood. He’s gone from platinum blond to I Love Lucy red.
Candy moves behind him in case he freaks and takes a runner.
Jonas says, “I don’t want to die here.”
Cale shouts, “Say another word and I’ll kill you myself!”
“Who do you think is in better shape to kill you, Jonas? Cale or me? Tell me where to find Hunahpu.”
“I’ll tell you if you don’t kill anyone.”
I nod.
“Good boy. That’s reasonable. Tell me. I’ll know if you’re lying.”
“Hunahpu works out of a lab in West Hollywood. Bio-Specialties Group.”
“What kind of lab is it?”
“I don’t know. There’s test tubes and shit. It’s a lab.”
“Will he be there now?”
“How should I know?”
“You got a number for him?”
Jonas’s hands are shaking so much he can hardly get the phone out of his pocket. The hoodoo I threw earlier should have just fried the part of the phone that makes calls. The address book and calendar still ought to work. Maybe.
Jonas nervously thumbs through a couple of screens. Cale’s girl is up on her feet. She tries to grab the phone from Jonas’s hands, but he shoves her back down in the blood. Candy kicks her hands out from under her when she tries to get up again.
“Jonas, you cocksucker, don’t tell him anything,” shouts Cale.
“and00">I don’t want anyone getting killed.”
Jonas holds up the phone so I can read the number off the screen.
“Good boy. You are not a completely useless human being. Now get the fuck out of here.”
“Cale? You okay? Cale?” calls his girl.
Jonas’s chest explodes with wet red holes. The blood on his shirt is real and it’s his. He collapses onto his knees and falls over onto his face.
I spin and see Cale pointing a .38 snub nose at me. Probably loaded with .357 rounds. He must have had it tucked in his boot. He has to use both hands to steady the gun enough to aim. The hammer is already halfway down. He gets off one shot. A body blurs by me. Candy has shoved one of the boys from Cale’s crew in front of me. He catches the bullet just below his right ear and is dead before he hits the pavement.
Cale manages to get off one more shot. It goes through my right sleeve. I feel some heat and blood, but the bullet does more damage to the coat than to me. Cale doesn’t know that, and too bad for him, neither does Candy.
She is on him and the blood isn’t my hoodoo spell this time. She’s gone full-on Jade and is tearing him apart.
“Candy, that’s enough,” I yell.
She turns to me. Her eyes are red slits in black ice. Her nails have grown out into curved claws and her mouth is full of sharp white shark teeth. Someone screams. Then a whole lot of people start screaming, which is the way it usually goes when people see a monster for the first time.
“Come on. He’s not going to get any deader.”
It takes her a minute to register my words. The beast is in control now and it takes a few seconds for the human part of her to get back online.
She walks over to me, her human face slowly replacing the Jade’s. I put my arm around her, whisper, “Thanks for looking out for me,” and kiss the top of her head.
Most of Cale’s crew is long gone. Only his girl is still there. I walk over to his body and push his head to the side. He’s a mess. When I wipe the blood away, I can make out the tattoos on his scalp and the rusty gears in my brain go click, click, click.
“What the hell is that doing there?” I ask Cale’s girl.
The girl says, “That’s the symbol for Sister Ludi. She’s a protector spirit.”
“I know what she is. What is she doing on Cale’s scalp?”
“What do you noWhat domean?”
“Sister Ludi is fake. A gaff. She’s something Sub Rosa touts made up to sell fake idols and potions to tourists. What’s her symbol doing on the head of someone who had to know that?”
A better question is what does a demon have to do with a fake goddess? I recognize it now. Sister Ludi’s sigil is the same symbol that was burned over the bed in Hunter’s room.
“Oh, that. It’s for Hunahpu. He’s really into Sister Ludi. He thinks saying she’s fake is some kind of Anglo conspiracy. Cale wore it to show respect and Hunahpu gave him a cut rate on product.”
She keeps looking at Cale’s body with no way to process what just happened. I feel a little sorry for her. But I feel sorrier for Hunter.
“Was it Hunahpu who gave you the special Akira for the Sentenza kid?”
“I don’t know who it was for, but yeah, Cale said there was a special batch for someone.”
“That’s all I needed to know.”
I take her by the arm and walk her to a cab that’s been waiting outside the club. Like everyone else, the driver is standing and gawking at the mess. I put Cale’s girl in the backseat and close the door.
“Listen to me,” I say, leaning in the window. “It’s hard and nasty what you saw tonight, but you’re lucky it happened now. Cale was never going to last doing what he does. There are people out there ten times harder and a hundred times meaner than Cale was ever going to be. He was always going to end up on his back with holes in him. The difference is if you’d stuck around much longer, you’d be lying in blood next to him, another dumb dead girl in a place that spews out more dumb dead girls than smog. Go home. Be sad for a while. When you’re over it, fall in love with someone who has better tattoos.”
I go around, give the driver some money, and tell him to take her home. Before he can get in the cab, I take out the .460 and pop a few rounds over the crowd’s head. The cut-down shotgun shells I’d loaded it with aren’t filled with pellets, but with one of Vidocq’s memory powders. It will scrub away the last hour from everyone’s brain. I might have a bad temper and be dating someone who eats people, but I’m not stupid enough to leave witnesses.
Someone’s dropped a coat on the ground. I pick it up, take Candy by the arm, and walk her around the corner. When we’re out of sight of the club, I use the coat to wipe Cale’s blood from her face and hands.
I say, “Thanks for saving me back there.”
Her eyes are a little vacant.
“Wow. I haven’t done that to a person for a long fan for a time.”
“How are you feeling?”
“A little spacey, but okay. Are you okay? We should get you to see Allegra to get the bullet out.”
“I’m fine. It barely grazed me and I’ve already stopped bleeding.”
She leans against the wall, a little out of breath.
“He shot you. I wouldn’t have done what I did if he hadn’t shot you.”
“I know.”
She stares at me, her eyes still a little unfocused, but she’s coming back to earth.
“Did I go too far?”
I shrug.
“Technically he did shoot me. And he did kill his friend, so we can assume he would have kept shooting until he killed me or I got him. So, yeah, you saved me, and from my point of view that’s a good thing.” I pause. “Next time, though, maybe you can just snack on the bad guys a little until we see just how much fight they have in them. We probably don’t need to kill all of them.”
“Don’t kill everyone. Got it. You sure you’re okay?”
“The arm’s fine. The coat took most of the damage. It was brand-new. Now it’s like all my damn clothes. Shot up and bled on.”
She cups my face in her hands and kisses me hard. I kiss her back.
“What happens now?” Candy says.
“We go see Hunahpu. I know where the address is. We can leave the bike.”
“How are we going to get there?”
I pull her away from the wall.
“Have you ever walked through a shadow?” I ask.
“Uh, no.”
“Want to?”
“Sure.”
“Don’t let go of my hand.”
I step into the ripe black darkness in the recess by a loading-bay door, pulling Candy with me into the Room of Thirteen Doors.
I take her out again near the address the kid gignss the ave me. It’s on Fairfax a little north of Beverly Boulevard.
As we step from the shadow, Candy says, “Holy fucking goddamn fuck, that’s cool. What was that room we went through?”
“It’s called the Room of Thirteen Doors. I can go anywhere in the universe through those doors, even to Heaven and Hell.”
“Why did we drive to the club? If I had something that cool, I’d be running in and out of it all day and night just to mess with people.”
I believe her. I’m glad I have the key and she doesn’t.
“It feels weird using it in the city when I’m going somewhere the first time. Like the club tonight. I didn’t know where it was or what was going to be there when we arrived. I like to drive because I like to get a look at a place the first time I go there.”
“Why don’t you just get your own car?”
“Are you kidding? People steal them.”
UP THE STREET is a white two-story office building plastered together to look vaguely colonial. It’s as bland and forgetful as any real-estate office.
The first floor is dark, but there are lights behind the windows on the second. It’s almost three and there’s barely any traffic in either direction. Candy and I walk across the street to the glass-and-aluminum front doors. BIO-SPECIALTIES GROUP is painted on the door in a reassuringly scientific-looking serif font.
In theory, I could step into a shadow here and come out on the second floor near the lights, but I don’t want to do that. Drug cookers tend to be on the jumpy side and I’ve already been shot at once tonight. I take Candy around the side of the building and we use a shadow to get into the lobby. No alarms go off, so they don’t have motion detectors down here. So far so good.
There’s a locked wooden door at the top of the stairs with the company’s name on it. I stand there for a minute.
“What are we doing?” asks Candy.
“Shh.”
Light leaks from beneath the door where it doesn’t quite touch the floor. I watch for moving shadows to see if people are moving around and how many there might be. Nothing moves past the door. I let the angel’s senses expand.
There are voices off to my right. Seven, maybe eight. The clinks and taps of metal and glass. The whir of machines and whisper of small gas flames. That will be the lab. Off to my left, closer to the street, I get nothing. Probably offices, unoccupied at this hour. Everyone seems to be beeneems tounched up in the lab.
I say, “Keep your head down when we get inside.” Then I take her hand and we slip inside through a shadow on the wall.
Behind the door is a reception area with a desk, computer, and phone. Wrought-iron letters spell out BIO-SPECIALTIES GROUP on the wall above the receptionist’s desk. Either the company deals with a lot of amnesiacs or they really, really like the sound of their own name.
