I grab Vidocq’s sleeve and pull him toward the door, firing the Luger until it’s empty. Vidocq keeps throwing his vials. Every now and then, an arm or a monstrous face contorts in pain from our feeble attack, but the wall goblins come roaring back at us a second later.
At the door, Vidocq shoves me away. “Let me go!” he shouts, and tears his arm free. He’s back inside the possessed room, with the walls just inches away from him. He reaches into the very bottom of his coat lining and pulls out a bottle the size of his brandy flask. Screaming, “Tas de merde!” he smashes the bottle on the writhing mass of arms and fangs and throws himself back into the room with me, knocking us both to the filthy floor.
The secret room is on fire, but the creatures in the walls are still trying to get at us, only they seem to be trapped behind an invisible barrier. Unfortunately, the fire is not. The rotten wood in our room ignites the moment flame gets near it. In a few seconds, the place is blazing like Nero’s Roman holiday. The good news is that a burning room creates a lot of excellent shadows. I grab Vidocq and drag him down into a deep slash of darkness at the edge of the Circle. We emerge, stumbling into the Room of Thirteen Doors, eyes tearing, lungs burning with smoke. I don’t stop moving, but guide Vidocq through the Door of Memory and out onto the cool and silent streets of Beverly Hills. The Porsche is at the other end of the block. We run for it.
By the time we get there, Mason’s vacant lot is cracking open and flames are shooting two stories into the air. By the time I get the car started and do a screaming one-eighty, the whole lot has collapsed in on itself, shaking the street like an earthquake and blasting a fat orange fireball into the night sky. I floor the Porsche, taking the first turn out of Beverly Hills on two wheels.
THERE’S AN UNLIT parking lot behind an out-of-business movie multiplex between Hollywood Boulevard and Selma Avenue. I park in a far corner so no one can see us from the street. I’m still rasping. I know it’s the smoke in my lungs, but it feels like I’ve been holding my breath since we got out of the ground. When I kill the Porsche’s engine, we can hear the scream of fire trucks echoing off the buildings all the way across town.
“Sounds like a lot of them.”
Vidocq snorts. “They always look after the rich. It’s the same in all cities in all times, all over the world.”
“What was in the last bottle you threw back there?”
“Spiritus Dei oil. A venerable old catholicon, and poisonous to almost any Hellion or Lurker beast. Very hard to find. That was my last bottle.”
“Sorry, man.”
“Don’t worry. The man I said I’d introduce you to will have more.”
I take the Zippo out of my pocket. “What am I going do with this thing?”
“Keep it. My exceptional knowledge of magic and the transmutation of elements tells me that it is not an ordinary lighter.”
“It’s a stupid vessel for such a powerful talisman.”
“Perhaps it was created for someone Mason knew would be drawn to it.”
“You think Mason left it for me?”
Vidocq shrugs wearily. “I don’t know. But it does seem more votre modèle than the other members of your Circle.”
“Yeah. I walked right off that cliff. But maybe the lighter will tell us something.”
“Let us hope.”
“So, you think Mason knows I’m back.”
“You just blew up his home. He might suspect something.”
I open and close my hands on the steering wheel, holding it tight. “I’m not ready yet. I barely have my feet on the ground.”
“Opportunity always comes too early or too late. But with what you found tonight, you are one step closer to your heart’s desire.”
I flip open the top of the lighter and strike it once. Vidocq jerks away, banging his shoulder into the door. The little flame flickers, but nothing else happens. I want a cigarette, but my throat and lungs feel like hot gravel. I close the lighter and put it back in my pocket.
“When we meet this guy with the Spiritus Dei, I’ll pay.”
“Excellent. I was about to suggest that very thing. You should meet him as soon as possible.”
“You think?”
“Absolument. He is a man who knows and possesses many useful things. And I think soon you will need more than your Sundance Kid guns to stay alive.”
AFTER I DROP off Vidocq, I stop behind a nearby Safeway, wipe the Luger for prints, and stuff it in the bottom of a very full and very smelly Dumpster. I don’t want the Luger near me. Who knows what crimes those Nazi freaks committed with it.
The Bamboo House of Dolls will be closed by now, but I need something to drink. I ditch the Porsche a block from Donut Universe, get a large black coffee and a couple of old-fashioneds, and walk the few blocks to Max Over-drive.
I’ve finished the coffee and one of the doughnuts when I reach the store. The lights are on. The front door is open and the glass shattered. I throw away the food, pull Azazel’s knife from my boot, and go inside quietly. The place is a wreck. Racks are turned over and discs and cases are scattered everywhere. The cash register, though, looks untouched, so it wasn’t thieves or crackheads who got in.
I kick through the broken glass and discs wondering who would want to just trash the place when I see a shoe sticking out from under one of the upturned racks. I grab the rack and flip it over. Allegra is lying there. She’s a mess. Her clothes are torn and her hands and face are bloody. I put my ear against her chest and am relieved to hear a slow and steady heartbeat. She weighs practically nothing, so I pick her up and carry her to my room. The door at the top of the stairs has been kicked in. I set Allegra on the bed and cover her with a blanket. When I go into the bathroom to get a wet cloth, I see something a lot scarier than the ghouls in Mason’s basement. The door to Kasabian’s closet is ripped off its hinges. He’s gone.
I clean the blood off Allegra’s face and drape the cool cloth across her forehead. When I push open her eyelids, her pupils are wide and they stay that way. A concussion. Not good. She moves her head and groans a little before pushing my hand away.
“What happened? I’m cold.”
She’s going into shock. I wrap the sheet around her. “You’re hurt.”
“Mr. Kasabian left. He looked dead, but he said goodbye.”
“I’m taking you to the hospital.”
She sits upright. Almost. She gets halfway up and drops back down.
“No hospital.”
“You have to. You’re hurt.”
“No hospital. They might call the cops.”
I didn’t see that coming. “I’m taking you anyway.”
That’s exactly the wrong thing to say. Allegra grabs my arm, pulls herself up and tries to slap me. It’s pretty impressive for someone who’s gasping like a dying goldfish.
“No hospitals! No cops!”
Having finally gotten the point, I help her back down on the bed. Scraps of paper, half-eaten burritos, and ashtrays full of cigarettes are piled on Kasabian’s worktable. I paw around the debris until I find the phone. I dial Kinski’s number. Someone picks up on the sixth ring.
“Is this Candy? This is Stark.”
“Stark? Lovely to hear from you. Tell me, Stark, do the clocks on your planet work like ours? Because the ones here on Earth tell me that it’s late for chitchat.”
“Shut up. I have a civilian here and I’m pretty sure she’s been hurt with magic. I don’t know how bad, but I think she’s got a concussion. Kinski is the only doctor I know about in L.A., so I’m bringing her to see him. If he isn’t there when I get there, I’m going to be extremely unhappy.”
“Okay. Do you have the address?”
Fucking brilliant. I’m threatening people I don’t know, but need, at an address I don’t have.
“Give it to me.” She does.
“See you soon,” she says.
I carry Allegra downstairs and leave her by the front door. Outside, I scan the street for transportation. I want somethin
g big so that Allegra can lie down, but mostly it’s Japanese compacts and Detroit Tinker Toys. Down by the corner, I see what I want, a shiny red Escalade. The problem is that two guys are sitting inside. Still, it’s worth checking out.
The guys are talking and laughing, passing a joint back and forth. Not a care in the world. I hate the idea of car-jacking for one simple reason. It’s a dog crime. A crime for morons and any little shitsack with the fifty bucks to buy a Saturday-night special. Still, I want the Escalade and I want it now. I look back at Max Overdrive, but Allegra’s inside and I can’t see her. As I turn back to the van, there’s a glint from the rear driver’s side window that I missed before. The glass is gone. The window is broken. The van is stolen. Hallelujah. I’m not carjacking. I’m regifting.
I go for the passenger first. He’s so ripped that when I grab him, he’s in full rag-doll mode, loose and relaxed. That’s a good way to hit the ground if you’re ever thrown—or pulled—from a vehicle. Only I toss him about ten or fifteen feet farther than I meant to. I’ve been boxing giant fire-breathing jellyfish and Hellions with skin like titanium. What do I know about fighting humans?
The driver is a pimply scarecrow with a Mohawk and a dirty Sex Pistols T-shirt ripped just so. He looks like a twelve-year-old dressed up like Sid Vicious for Halloween. When his buddy goes flying out of the van, his buzzed brain finally realizes that something is happening. He starts fumbling in his waistband for his gun, but his pothead reflexes aren’t helping him. He might as well be wearing oven mitts. But I’d rather not get shot again if he manages to get all his digits working.
While he fumbles I grab the top of the door frame, kick off the edge of passenger door, and slide across the Escalade’s roof, landing cat quiet on the driver’s side. Speed Racer finally has the gun out, cocked and pointed at exactly where I’m not anymore. I lean in the open window, grab him by the neck, and haul him out, pinning his gun arm to his body. When he struggles, I bounce his head off the side of the van. Just once. Dazed and docile, it’s easy to flip him over my shoulder, carry him around the van, and dump him near his friend. His gun I toss down a sewer grate.
Back at Max Overdrive, Allegra is on her feet, shaky as a newborn calf. I scoop her up in both arms, carry her to the Escalade, open the back, and lay her out flat.
“No hospitals,” she says.
“I know.”
“Where are we going?”
“For ice cream. What’s your favorite flavor?”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s my favorite, too.”
The two guys I tossed out of the van weren’t complete idiots after all. They did a decent job of bypassing the Escalade’s alarm and cutting into the van’s keyless ignition. I twist a couple of exposed wires together and the Escalade purrs to life. Stepping on the accelerator, I cut the van across two lanes of traffic, twist the wheel, and aim the Escalade down Hollywood to where it crosses Sunset.
This isn’t a situation where red lights, yellow lights, or anything that slows us down are acceptable. But what kind of a spell do you use to change the timing on traffic lights? If I wasn’t such a freak-show attraction, I’d know something like that. Or I’d be able to fake it the way I faked my way through magic in the old days. All I can think of right now is a Hellion controlling spell, something I’d throw at an opponent in the arena to take control of their body and keep them from murdering me for a little while longer.
As the light turns yellow at the intersection ahead, I bark out the spell. Literally bark. High Hellion is mostly a bunch of low, guttural verbs and nouns strung together with growling adjective gristle. It sounds like a wolf with throat cancer.
I get the spell out as the light goes from yellow to red. As I finish the spell, it flips back to yellow. Then the light explodes, the housing suddenly white-hot shrapnel that hits the Escalade’s roof like metal hailstones. The light’s support pole is pretty much gone. So are the overhead lines that send juice to electric buses below.
Sorry, commuters. Tell your boss to fuck off tomorrow. Some terrorist asshole blew up all your vital crosswalk signals.
The second and third lights explode, too. The fourth just kind of sizzles, spits sparks, and goes out. I don’t even look after that. It’s flare guns and Roman candles all the way down to Sunset.
THE ADDRESS CANDY gave me is in a strip mall that hadn’t been there before I went Downtown. I pull the Escalade into the parking lot and help Allegra out of the back. She insists on walking on her own, which I choose to see as a good sign. Doc Kinski’s office is tucked between a fried-chicken franchise and a nail salon with signs in Vietnamese and dyslexic English. I double-check the address. It checks out.
The office is a blank storefront with blinds covering all the windows and the words existential healing on the door in gold peel-and-stick letters. I try the door, but it’s locked. I start pounding and the door swings open almost immediately. A tiny shaggy-haired brunette in tattered black jeans and Chuck Taylors stands there.
“Candy?”
From the way she talked on the phone, I was expecting a big blond Judy Holliday type, not Joan Jett’s little sister.
“Bring her inside. Doc is waiting.”
The inside of the clinic is as bare as the outside. A couple of junkyard desks, with a not very new-looking laptop on top of one. A file cabinet covered in real estate stickers, Half a dozen metal folding chairs and a pile of Sports Illustrated and Cosmopolitans, probably pulled from the Dumpster behind the nail salon.
This is the office of Vidocq’s angel of mercy?
I’m seriously thinking about taking Allegra out of here and to a real hospital, no matter what I promised her. Then Kinski walks out of his exam room.
“What are you waiting for? Get the girl in here,” he tells me. I do.
Kinski is as impressive as his office isn’t. He’s tall. A little taller than me. Like me, he’d been a lanky boy, but the years have added a few pounds to his middle and etched lines like a desert riverbed around his eyes. But he’s still handsome. You can tell that when he was young he’d been the kind of good-looking that made girls forget about their boyfriends for the night and made guys want to punch him in the face on principle.
Allegra is too wobbly to walk anymore. I pick her up, follow Kinski into the next room, and set her down on a padded exam table.
He touches her head and cheeks. Takes her pulse at her wrist and her neck and moves each lid back for a look at her eyes. Allegra squirms on the table and tries to push him away.
“You hurting?” he asks.
“Yeah. My head.”
“Anywhere else?”
Allegra shakes her head.
“Okay. I want you to try and relax. Just breathe in and out real deeply. Can you do that?”
She nods, takes in long breaths, and lets them out slowly. Kinski puts one hand lightly on her forehead and keeps it there. He pats himself down and finds something like a piece of blackened jerky from his breast pocket.
“Chew on this,” he says, putting the jerky between her lips.
“What is it?” she asks.
“You’ll like it. It’s dried fruit. Tastes good.”
She chews and he keeps his hand on her, staring down like he’s listening for something. I hear it, too. Her breathing and heartbeat slow abruptly. Her body relaxes. Kinski shoots me a quick glance like he knows that I can hear it, too.
“She’s out,” he says to Candy, and turns back to me.
“What really happened to her?”
“I don’t know exactly. I came back and the place was broken into. I think by a guy named Parker. He’s another magician. Some magic things were missing.”
“What kind of things?”
“A guy. Part of a guy, really.”
“Part of a guy. Okay. Are you fooling around with stuff over there that’s going to make this girl’s condition more complicated? Any potions or herbs related to necromancy? Are you playing with any resurrection rituals?”
??
?Never.”
“Okay. But you come in here with an injured girl and tell me that some magic part of a guy that you don’t want to talk about gets stolen and I start thinking zombies. And that is some serious stuff.”
“It’s nothing like that. The guy wasn’t dead. I was real careful about that.”
“So careful this girl’s skull is cracked.”
“Can you fix her?”
“I’ve fixed worse.” He looks over at Candy. “You want to get me the things, honey? I want to make sure this girl is all the way dozing before I take my hand off.”
“How many do you want?”
“I think six should do it.”
Candy gets six fist-size objects from an old medical cabinet. Each of the objects is wrapped in dark purple silk. She sets them on the exam table next to Allegra and unwraps them. They’re six shiny pieces of some milky-white stone.
Kinski lets go of Allegra, takes two of the stones, and places them on each side of her head. Candy places others over her heart and in her hands. Kinski puts the last piece, the smallest and nearly flat, between Allegra’s teeth.
He gets old, unglazed clay jars from under the table, pours several oils onto his hands, rubs them together to mix them, then smears the dark potion on Allegra’s face. The oils smell like jasmine and wet pavement after a rain.
Candy gives Kinksi a carved wooden stylus and he draws symbols, strange letters, and runes into the oil. I lean in to get a better look at the markings. He’s drawing a spell on her, but I don’t know what kind. I’ve never seen one like it before. I recognize the characters surrounding the central circle and seven-pointed star, however. The symbols are an old angelic script. Enochian. Azazel taught me some spells from ancient books written in that script. Kinski can’t be a Hellion because only Lucifer can walk out of Hell. But Hellions have plenty of human lapdogs. Lurker groupies and satanic assholes. Kinski can’t be one, though. Vidocq would know and he’d never send me to the guy. Still. I slip my hand under my coat and touch Azazel’s knife.