Kill the Dead

NOW I’M ON two missions. Three if you break them down the long way:

Weasel information out of Cabal.

Kill Drifters, zeds, Lacunas, whatever.

Get paid. That one’s mine and it gets taken care of first.

I’m in no mood to waste time on door monkeys, so I walk through a shadow and out into the Vigil’s compound. One of the gate guards sees me and starts yammering into a talkie. I give him a friendly wave and head inside. You might be fast on the button, but don’t count on a raise this year, pal.

The warm Jell-O hoodoo barrier at the warehouse door always makes my skin crawl. For the second it takes to pass through it, it’s like you’ve been body-snatched into a German oatmeal-fetish video.

People have seen me here before, so no one bats an eye when I get in. I walk like I’m heading for an appointment in one of the offices at the other end of the building. I almost make it, too.

A gaggle of Vigil hall monitors closes in on me from all sides. They have their guns on me and they mean it, but they’re too disciplined to start blasting. Marshal Julie, the newbie from the Springheel house, is part of the posse. I walk over to her. Her heartbeat goes up, but I keep enough distance between us so she doesn’t get too twitchy and open fire.

“Good to see you, Marshal. Did they let you see any dead bodies yet or are the boys still making you bring them coffee and play junior high drinking games because tough guys think vomit is hilarious and only pussies die of alcohol poisoning?”

“Why can’t you enter a building like a normal person, Stark? It would simplify everyone’s life.”

“My life is simple and getting simpler by the minute. Did you ever wonder if they haze men as hard as they haze women around here?”

“You’re trespassing on a restricted federal site. If you want to get arrested, why don’t you go and do something interesting first?”

“I’m a paid consultant to this organization who took a shortcut inside. Mea culpa. Get Wells down here and he can put a nasty note in my personnel file.”

“You don’t have a personnel file because you’re not a person.”

It’s Wells. He’s behind me.

“You’re an entity. Not the same thing as a person by a long shot.”

“Why don’t you have your crew put their guns down? I have a business proposition for you.”

“That’s funny because I have one for you, too.”

He comes around into my field of vision and stops in front of me. He looks tired. Like he’s been pulling a lot of late nights. He motions for the G-men to lower their guns.

“We’re fine here, everyone. Go back to what you were doing.”

He glances at Marshal Julie as she holsters her gun and walks away.

“Don’t talk to my people like you know them. Especially the new ones. It confuses them. It makes them think you’re on our side.”

“I am on your side when I get paid. I’ve done every job you asked me to do.”

“So does my dog when I tell her to. She does a trick and gets a biscuit, same as you.”

“Do you take taxes and Social Security out of that? How many biscuits does it cost her a month?”

Wells walks to the edge of the warehouse. I follow him. Gray plastic storage crates marked with diamond-shaped chemical warning stickers are stacked against the wall. He sits down on one and glances at his watch.

“You said you wanted to talk to me about something.”

“Yeah. High Plains Drifters and what you want me to do about them.”

“In Los Angeles? Not possible. I’d have heard about it.”

“You’d think so. It’s funny that you don’t. I thought you had some supercharged radar that tracked us magic types. Or was that another Vigil fairy tale?”

“It’s real all right. I know where you go, who you go with, and what you do.”

“Then why don’t you know about the dead men who wandered into Bamboo House of Dolls for human sushi?”

“Never. I’d have heard and we’d be on alert.”

“I guess omnipotence isn’t what it used to be. But I can fix that for you. I’ve already killed three Drifters. Give me a contract and I’ll get the rest. There’s probably a lot of them, so I ought to get time and a half on this one.”

Wells scowls. He looks around like he’s expecting someone.

“If you killed three, then where are the bodies?”

“A friend got rid of them for me.”

“And where did this friend put them?”

“I didn’t ask. She has people who know how to dispose of people eaters.”

“It was just one other person you worked with a minute ago and now it’s people. How many people exactly?”

“I couldn’t say.”

He takes a tired breath and rubs his eyes.

“So, you let someone I don’t know call people you don’t know to haul away the remains of some of the most dangerous creatures walking the earth. And you want me to hire you to kill a whole pod. How many do you think are left? One? A dozen? Fifty? What are you going to do with those bodies? Maybe your friend’s friends can take them down to the Farmers’ Market and sell the bones to tourists. You can start a co-op. Make friendship bracelets and wind chimes and share the profits.”

“Let me ask you something, Deputy Dawg. If the Vigil isn’t onto the Drifters, what’s keeping you up nights?”

His frown goes to a smile and back to a frown.

“Things are going to change. In this town and beyond. Far beyond.”

“What? You going to raid all the Valley hipsters having ghost swinger parties? Let me know if you need to use condoms with things made of ectoplasm. I’ve always wondered about that.”

“How’s the movie business treating you? Have you gotten to hobnob with the stars? Maybe your new best friend can get you an agent and a part in his movie, then you can leave all this behind.”

“What’s the matter? Getting jealous of Lucifer? Don’t be mad, baby. You knew this wasn’t an exclusive thing. We agreed we could see other people.”

“I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt. I thought your foul mouth and your shitty attitude were part of a post-traumatic stress reaction to being back on earth. Now I have to ask myself whose side are you truly on? The light or the dark?”

“Why is it you can say ‘shit’ when you’re mad, but I get yelled at for it?”

Two of Wells’s men in black wheel in a crystal ball the size of a Volkswagen Bug on a metal dolly. The blurry outline of a demon is just visible inside the ball as it beats itself against the walls.

“Why would you work for an animal like Lucifer?”

I shake my head.

“I’ve already had this talk once today and I’m not doing it again with you.”

“I’m going to tell you something and then I’m going to ask you something. I want to listen to both things carefully, as if your future depends on them, because it does.”

“Say it, then.”

“Under the provisions of the U.S. Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security has declared Lucifer an unlawful foreign combatant as well as a suspect in a number of terrorist activities around the world. I have a federal warrant for his arrest. You’re going to help me serve the warrant.”

“I am?”

“I understand that this is a high-risk situation and I don’t expect you to do it for free. Work with me. Serve the warrant and help me arrest Lucifer. With your unique experience and abilities, I can offer you a full-time position at the highest government pay grade.”

“Does that come with dental and a company car?”

“This is a onetime offer. You can be my friend or you can be my enemy. It’s your choice.”

“Is this Aelita’s idea? If she’s that bored, hire me to find what’s left of the Kissi and bring them back. She can have fun fighting them.”

“Were you even listening? This isn’t Vigil business. It’s DHS.”

“Bullshit. In L.A. they’re the same thing.”

“Let’s say you’re right. It doesn’t alter your situation. New DHS policy says that we can no longer work with questionable outside vendors.”

“I was right. This is all Aelita.”

“Lucifer’s name is on the national terrorist watch. The classified one. You’re not yet, but you’ll be happy to know that your friend Kinski is on there, too.”

“Why?”

“We can’t let fallen angels run around the countryside any more than we can allow terrorists to drive around with vans full of kerosene and fertilizer.”

“When do I go on the list?”

“That all depends on whether you’re my friend or my enemy.”

“It was you who ambushed us after the party the other night, wasn’t it?”

“It wasn’t the Little Rascals.”

“For a while I thought it might be you, but then I remembered what Aelita said. That you don’t care about Lucifer. He’s past his prime.”

“Don’t try to think. It doesn’t look good on you.”

“Ever since then I’ve been trying to figure out who would be a better candidate. I was starting to think it was Ritchie, the guy who runs the studio. He hires off-duty cops to work security and has the money to throw his own Apocalypse Now ambush. But it was the simple answer all along. Serves me right for trying to be creative.”

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

“I thought you people were all about keeping the universe in balance, not handing the whole thing over to one side. This is definitely Aelita’s idea. You haven’t got the guts to think this big. So, what’s she getting out of this? A shinier halo? A transfer off this rock?”

“Answer the question.”

“I gave Aelita my answer six months ago. None of you own me. Go ahead and put me on your list.”

His lips tug up in a little smile.

“I’ve already drafted the memo. I knew you couldn’t respond reasonably to a reasonable offer. You’re just like my dog. Entirely predictable.”

“What happens now? Do you have snipers on me already? Or do the two of us go outside and have a Tombstone showdown? If you’d told me we were going to party, I’d have brought Wild Bill’s gun.”

“Nothing like that. You just walk on out of here and don’t ever walk in again. You and I will settle this in time, but right now the grown-ups have bigger fish than you to fry.”

He gets up and nods to someone, then heads back to his office. When I turn around, six of his people are spread out in a semicircle around me. No one is pointing a gun at me, but together they look like little Grim Reapers reincarnated as bouncers at a Beverly Hills yuppie bar.

“Admit it. You used canned olives in your martinis.”

Nothing. Tough room.

Maybe Wells is right and it’s time to pick a side. If I’d said yes to him, do you think any of these dour cocksuckers would have cracked even a polite smile? I’m not holding my breath. Lucifer wouldn’t have laughed either, but at least he wouldn’t be morally superior about it.

We’re just bugs on God’s windshield. No one owns me.

These are the good and righteous people who sat on their fat asses and let Mason and Parker murder Alice and send me to Hell. And then they let him waltz away. I might not have been a good guy before, but I loved someone and I wasn’t broken into a million little pieces. I wasn’t as hollow and dead inside as a locust husk.

I know whose side I’m on.

Mine.

I walk outside and leave through the front gate, Wells’s gunsels trailing behind me like a line of black ducklings.

THE PHONE RINGS four times. I’m about to hang up when she answers.

“Hey. What are you doing?”

“Nothing important. I’m reading the Light Bringer script, trying to learn my lines. What do you think it tells us about the world that I have less to say as Eve than I do when I make my pornographic films?”

“Want to go talk to a guy with a rep for using Drifters to do his dirty work?”

“Drifters?”

“Zeds. Golems. The dead boys from last night.”

“Ah. Prázdný, you mean.”

“Zed has less syllables, so I win. Do you want to meet the guy?”

“Who is it?”

“Cabal Ash.”

She spits out something in Czech. I can’t understand it, but I don’t think it’s “yippee!”

“Sure.”

“Where are you?”

“At Simon’s. Where are you?”

“At Max Overload. I could get a car and pick you up.”

“No thank you. Simon told me about you and cars. I’ll pick you up.”

“Okay. Don’t forget to bring the toy you were going to show me. The Drifter de-boner.”

“Ah. I was waiting for you to say something sexy. I thought for a moment that all you remembered about the night was the business behind the bar.”

“I remember the business inside the bar, too. You always remember losing your virginity.”

“Good boy. I’ll see you in half an hour.”

“I’ll be out front.”

Kasabian looks up as I thumb the phone off. While I was talking he was pretending to work.

“That was her, wasn’t it?”

“Who?”

“Don’t be cute. Bring her up when she gets here.”

“Next lifetime maybe.”

“At least get her to sign these.”

He holds up a couple of DVDs he was hiding on his table.

“I found a couple of her movies from when I was bootlegging discs to make ends meet.”

“Poor you. Forced to steal porn.”

“Hey, there weren’t any American versions. They were all European. PAL format. The wrong region code. By reformatting them, I was performing a public service.”

“For horny old men and bonehead teenyboppers.”

“Who needs more help than them?”

“I’m not bringing her up. But I’ll get her to sign your discs.”

“Have her make it out to ‘Aldous.’”

“You sure you don’t want to go with ‘Alfredo Garcia’?”

“Fuck you. It’s an old family name.”

“That’ll be our little secret.”

“Fuck you twice. I’m not taking name abuse from someone called Sandman Slim. That sounds like a diet shake with roofies.”

I look at him perched on the desk, his little legs on his keyboard. He frowns back at me, a defiant head on glorified skateboard.

I hate it when Kasabian is right. I take the DVDs and put them in a Max Overload bag.

“You’re a cruel man, you know that, Aldous?”

“I’d give a rat’s ass if you weren’t running off with the love of my life.”

“This week’s love.”

“That goes without saying.”

BRIGITTE PICKS ME up in a very new pale blue Porsche Targa. She’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, plus a leather jacket for protection.

She greets me with a deep kiss when I’m inside. I kiss her back, but keep an eye open. I have to admit that after Lucifer and Wells, I’m starting to feel black helicopters circling. Ritchie seems like the kind of control freak who might have Brigitte followed. Or the Vigil could be back there. I can slap Ritchie into shredded wheat or hex him into a bowling trophy, but if Wells gets a bug up his ass, the world will get ugly fast.

Brigitte uses her thumb to wipe lipstick off my lower lip. Maybe Romany are psychic after all because she says, “Relax. No one is watching. You’re not the only one trained to look for these things.”

“Point taken.”

“Where are we going?”

I read her the hospital’s address on South St. Louis Street off my phone. She punches it into the GPS on her dashboard and we head out. I always thought those boxes were for losers, but it shows us a quick, direct route through the traffic. I make a mental note that in the future I should only steal cars equipped with the boxes.

There are TV trucks parked across the street from Linda Vista. Can you go ten minutes in this town without seeing some idiot running down the street in a Steadicam rig like he has a giant robot hard-on? I hope the hospital is haunted so when the director has the cinematographer zoom in on a really interesting bloodstain on the floor, he gets a late-night Christmas-carol visit from the blood’s owner.

“There will be security if they’re filming. How do we get in?” asks Brigitte.

“I found a map of the place online. We can use a trick I have for getting in places without using the door. But you don’t get to ask any questions about it.”

“Now you absolutely have to show me.”

We walk across the street, pointing at the building like a couple of tourists. I get Brigitte to snap pictures with her phone while I look for out-of-the-way shadows. We find some by the old emergency entrance.

“Take my hand and don’t let go until we’re all the way inside.”

“All right.”

She resists a little as I pull her into the shadow. And then again when I pull her out of the Room and through the Door of Restless Ardor.

“What was that place?”

“What did I say about questions?”

“You’re no fun.”

“Yes, I am.”

We follow the map to the rear of the hospital, beyond where the crew is filming. We’re on a side hall and can see the lights and cameras where they’re shooting in the wide central corridor. The director yells, “Action!” A woman screams. Voices moan. A bloody nurse runs by, chased by a mob of filthy, groaning patients. Fuck me. They’re making a zombie movie.

One more turn and we’re in the morgue. The white tile walls are cracked and streaked with grime. There’s a banged-up gurney against one wall. Someone went at the padding with a knife and left it scattered on the floor like white tumbleweeds. I don’t want to know what’s inside the pullout coolers in the walls.

We head into the big freezer. It’s dark inside and—surprise, surprise—the lights don’t work. Just as I’m trying to think of some hoodoo that makes light without blowing something up, the place brightens. Brigitte’s turned on a small LED flashlight she had in her pocket.

She asks, “What are we looking for?”

“We’re not. I am. Unless someone left the door open, you need to be Sub Rosa to find these things.”

I feel along one wall and then another. It’s between the seams running down one row of tiles. The wall swings open silently.

Brigitte coos.

“I love magic. You must show me more.”

“I think you’ll see plenty before this is over.”

The door swings shut behind us and we’re in a low stone passage. Yellow light outlines a curtain up ahead. I go through first and hold the curtain back for Brigitte.

Cabal understands Sub Rosa chic. This location is even shittier than Springheel’s shack.

The place looks like the house of the month in Better Homes & Monsters. It’s all dark stone walls. There’s a huge fireplace with andirons the size of parking meters. The furniture is made of old stained mahogany. Most of the varnish has been worn off the armrests on the chairs and they’re covered with water stains and glasses and cigarette burns. Traces of half-eaten food and empty liquor bottles are scattered on every surface of the room. There are tapestries of hunting parties and war scenes hanging on the walls. One shows horsemen with scimitars slicing up a village of women and children. The men are already dead, tossed on a bonfire in the lower right corner of the tapestry. Cabal is going for a Vlad the Impaler look, but he’s ended up with a Slayer album cover.

Cosima, Cabal’s sister or wife or both, comes through a curtain that runs the length of one wall. On the curtain is an image of a Black Sun wheel. Ancient, hard-core hoodoo that supposedly gives dark mystics power over the material world. The Nazis loved the Sun wheel. Of course, things didn’t work out so well for them, so maybe they forgot to plug theirs in or something.

“You can’t just walk in here without an appointment. Cabal won’t like it,” says Cosima.

“We met at the Geistwalds’ party.”

“I know who you are and he still wouldn’t like it.”

“I don’t like having to walk in here and I’ll like having to walk out even less, so you can let him know I’m here or I will.”

Cosima looks Brigitte up and down and goes back through the curtain. Brigitte and I follow.

The next room is similar to the one we just left, but the furniture is a lot more comfortable. Plush sofas, love seats, and pillows on the floor. At least a dozen people are passed out asleep around the room, some dressed and some not. They were really living it up. Wonder what they were celebrating?

Cabal comes out of a door that looks like it was looted from Lucifer’s broom closet. He’s wearing a stained floor-length black robe, a little like a cassock. He looks skinny out of his rags and is cleaner than he was at the Geistwalds’, but he still smells like he uses sewage for aftershave. He’s holding a half-empty wine bottle in one hand. Cabal smiles, showing big yellow teeth, and holds out his hand. He knows I don’t want to shake it. I’ve met guys like this before. Everything is a test with them. Will I shake his hand? Do I get mad when he makes a dumb joke at my expense or weepy when he insults me? Alpha-male bullshit. But I can’t get too mad. I’ve done it plenty myself. I take his hand and shake like we just bought Manhattan for some M&M’s and a carton of Luckies.

Cabal waves us back into the other room and away from his snoring guests. He stumbles and sways trying to step over them and almost dumps his wine on a naked kid sleeping in golf shoes.

Cabal waves us over to the big table and drops down into the head seat. Brigitte and I sit next to each other. He offers us the bottle.

Brigitte puts up a hand and I shake my head.

“To what do I owe the honor of such an unexpected, but charming visit?”

“I wanted to ask you something.”

“Goodie. I love twenty questions.”

“You can drop the drunk act. If you were drunk, I could smell it in your sweat. All you did was take a hit off the bottle and swish it around your mouth so your breath would smell of wine.”

He gives me a wink.

“Clever boy. Cuts right to it, doesn’t be? We can’t put anything past this one, can we, young lady? I didn’t catch your name.”

“Brigitte Bardo.”

“Of course. Ritchie’s darling. Forgive me, my dear. I only know you from your work and I didn’t recognize you without a cock or two in your mouth. It’s lovely to finally meet you in the flesh.”

“And you.”

“If you don’t mind me inquiring, do you have just the tiniest bit of Gypsy blood in you?”

“I don’t mind you asking. And yes, I do.”

“I thought so. You people play some glorious music. Of course, you weren’t so appreciated where I’m from. Most likely it was all the stealing.”

“If there’s anything missing after our visit, send a bill to Simon’s and I’ll have it taken care of.”

He laughs and takes a swig from the bottle.

“Love your Nazi curtain,” I say.

Cabal turns in his chair and looks at the Black Sun like he’s never seen it before.

“Oh, that. One has to keep up appearances. Clients expect a bit of the scary-scary when they call on me.”

“Is that why you have a slaughtered village hanging on your wall?”

He moves his eyes to look at the tapestry.

“Sadly, no. That’s more of a family portrait. We’re not the ones on horseback but the ones on fire.”

He has a pretty strong magic barrier set up around his thoughts, so I can’t tell if that’s a sad damned story or a pretty effective lie.

“I wanted to talk to you about Drifters.”

Cabal shakes his head.

“It breaks my heart to disappoint you, but the resurrected are not within the purview of my business dealings. I toil in the more prosaic fields of demons and elementals.”

“But you’ve used them, haven’t you? Maybe you don’t use them on a regular basis, but how about in some kind of rent-to-own deal?”

He shrugs.

“As I said, one has to keep up appearances. When a competitor or social upstart oversteps the clearly demarcated boundaries of my sphere of influence, they must and will be dealt with swiftly and in as decisive a manner as it takes so that they might serve as an object lesson to others with similar rash inclinations.”

“So, you have used Drifters against your enemies.”

“Once or twice. I won’t deny it.”

“When was the last time?”

“I can’t recall with any great clarity. One gets old. Many of the things that were so crystalline clear in one’s youth become misty and difficult to plumb from the depths in our later years. Though I work hard to keep up appearances, I’m afraid I’m not the man I once was.”

Brigitte says, “In my experience, that’s what men say when they’re exactly the man they used to be, but hope to deny it with age and excuse it with youth.”

Cabal claps his hands in light, quick applause.

“Well said, young lady. You’ve ensnared me in a petite prevarication. Which, unhappily for you, doesn’t alter the fact that I have not consorted with the resurrected, either deliberately or inadvertently, in many, many years.”

I say, “It doesn’t help Regina Maab that it was a long time ago. Eaten is eaten and dead is dead.”

“Regina? What does she have to do with this?”

“Nothing, other than the fact that when she stepped on your toes you sent some Lacunas over with a jar of barbecue sauce and charcoal briquettes.”

His eyes narrow and he sits up. All traces of the drunk act are gone.

“Listen to me closely, young man. That’s not the kind of thing I’ll tolerate being murmured about me, not by you or any other soul in this sunny burg. Regina and I had our differences, yes. And there came a moment when she required the administration of a lesson that she would remember on a molecular level. And yes, I vainly and foolishly employed a gaggle of resurrected in what you might term a professorial manner to deliver said lesson, but when Ms. Maab took leave of Los Angeles, she was most exceedingly and annoyingly alive.”

“Why should I believe you when everyone else is positive you had her snuffed?”

He leans back in his chair and takes a box from his pocket, opens it, and pulls out what looks like a wriggling earthworm.

“Do you have a light?” he asks.

I reach for Mason’s lighter and Cabal picks up the earthworm, running a grimy finger along the length of its body several times. The worm straightens and stiffens until it looks like a pink chopstick. I hold out the lighter and flick it. Cabal leans in, holds my wrist, and puts the worm’s head into the flame. He puffs a few times and the worm catches, the end glowing cherry red. As Cabal smokes, he takes out a small black book and a pencil. He flips through the book, writes something down, and slides the piece of paper across the table to me.

“That is Regina’s number in Mumbai. That’s far away in a country called India. You might have heard of it. If you adjudge to ring her, please give the old girl my best.”

I hand Brigitte the number and she looks it over. I let her hold on to it because her clothes probably don’t get destroyed as often as mine.

“What kind of problem did you have with the Springheels?”

He looks genuinely puzzled by that. It caught him off guard and I can feel the edges of his mind sifting through old memories.

“None. They were like water buffalo shitting in the streets of Kathmandu. Like any lifelong resident of that fair city, they were something I neither noticed nor particularly cared about.”

“They were an important family once.”

“Virgin sacrifice and bloodletting were considered of the utmost importance once, but when they outlived their efficacy they were abandoned along with the other discarded refuse of an earlier, though in some ways more graceful, time.”

“You old Sub Rosa families are pretty concerned about your place in the social pecking order. The Springheels were the first family in America. You didn’t think that kind of history might overshadow you just a little?”

“The Springheels were a dusty diorama. A museum display illustrating Neanderthal man’s first crude efforts to control fire and not shit themselves at every opportunity. The only reason the Springheel family still existed was as a concession to nostalgia and sentimentality. They might have begun their days well in this green and verdant land, but through shrewd planning and incandescent gamesmanship, they managed to metamorphose from ancient royalty into dirt-scrounging hillbillies. They threatened my house as much as this luminous worm.”

He holds up his pink cigarette.

“What happened to them?”

“Time. The world. Charles Springheel, the one who repatriated the family to California, designed and constructed exquisite charms, protective objects, talismans, and the like. He was, at heart, a tinkerer. And a brilliant one, but sitting in your ivory tower fiddling with Lilliputian cogs and thingamabobs is no way to maintain one’s standing in the world. Many of us purchased Charles’s contraptions over the years, both to bolster the old boy’s sense of purpose and to add a bit of lucre to the family’s dwindling fortune. But there’s only so much one can do. A fool determined to saunter off a cliff will find his way around even the most formidable barricades.”

I’m learning to really hate Cabal. I don’t want to believe the words coming out of his skull-white face, but after seeing the pathetic and maybe deliberate death scene at the Springheel house, I can’t argue with what he’s saying about the family.

“Since you’re our resident demon expert, did Enoch Springheel ever ask you for advice on how to summon or control them?”

“Enoch seldom discoursed with anyone. Certainly not with me. The few times a year he would deign to appear at Sub Rosa soirees, he left the distinct impression of a man marooned in the Sahara of his own psyche.”

“Who would we go to if we wanted to learn about Drifters or perhaps hire one?” Brigitte asks.

Cabal shakes his head.

“No one mucks about with the resurrected these days. Too dangerous. You’d be making yourself vulnerable to a veritable avalanche of peril, both from the families and our lovely local Inquisitor, Medea Bava.”

“So, there aren’t any Drifter experts in L.A.?”

“There are a number; however, by publicly acquiescing to such a dubious practice, they would be aiming a gun to their own precious skulls. To put it in blunt terms that you’ll understand, they won’t talk to you. I’m not so rude as to call myself an expert, but I have more than a passing knowledge of the resurrected. Is there something specific you wish to know?”

“Unless you know someone in town who runs with them, no.”

Cabal drops the last few inches of the burning worm on the floor and crushes it out with his bare foot.

“I’m curious about the depth of your knowledge concerning our hungry friends. If I had a sense of your understanding, perhaps I could speed you along in your investigations.”

“Out of the kindness of your heart?”

He smiles.

“To get you off my fucking back.”

I look at his eyes. It doesn’t look like he’s lying. And he’s genuinely interested in hearing what I’ll say.

“Brigitte is the expert, but she’ll talk longer and I’m in a rush, so here’s what I know. There are Drifters and Lacunas. One is dumb as dirt and one is maybe as smart as a house-trained poodle. They bite and they won’t stop until you rip out their spines.”

Cabal looks at Brigitte. She clears her throat.

“I could recite a thousand years of lore and list the anatomical and biological differences of the species, but for the purposes of our mission, James is right.”

Cabal kills off the wine and drops the bottle on the floor.

“I see that I can aid you children with your quest, after all. When I place this bauble of knowledge into your greedy hands, I’d be immoderately grateful if you would quietly exit the way you came and leave me to my guests.”

“Deal.”

“Most Sub Rosa don’t have any greater understanding of revenants than you. They memorize a few salient facts and drop them into conversations at cocktail parties to make themselves sound more interesting than they really are. I know this because most people believe that the resurrected are a binary species, but the truth is they are tripartate. You mentioned golems or Drifters, as you call them, and Lacunas. They are a formidable pair but there is also a tertiary species known to those with a deeper knowledge as Saperes and to the man in the street as Savants. The peril with this particular resurrected is that you will often not perceive its true nature until it’s eating your guts au gratin. Savants appear to be fully functional members of the brotherhood of man. They can chitchat, hold a job, dress themselves, and they possess, or seem to possess, the power of thought as clearly and intoxicatingly as you or I.”

“So, a Savant is a Lacuna that can call for pizza delivery. I don’t get it. Why are they so special that no one knows about them?”

“The first, most obvious reason, is panic. Admitting the existence of a strain of resurrected invisible to even adept Sub Rosa would have dire consequences. Human history is strewn with the corpses of those entangled in the panicked slaughter of mobs. This is especially true if the person or people perceived by the general population is different. Wouldn’t you agree, little Gypsy?”

“Definitely.”

“That was the obvious reason. What’s the other?”

“Saperes are special because nature or God or some other entity has chosen to make them so. You see, at any one time there are exactly twenty-seven of them in the world. No more. No less. If one is destroyed, a new one appears somewhere else. It then becomes the burden of those of us, as you say, in the know, to find it. It’s not unlike Buddhist monks searching for each new incarnation of a Lama subsequent to the death of the old one.”

“Is that all?”

“You’re one of those dark souls impossible to satisfy, aren’t you?”

He wants to start an argument. I just smile and shrug.

“The number of Saperes appears deliberate. If you add two and seven, you get nine. Nine is a holy number. Three times three. The Trinity times the Trinity. I could go on, but you see the pattern.”

“What does it mean?”

“I have no idea. No one does. And that’s another reason Saperes are such a closely held secret. We haven’t a clue as to how they befit the everyday workings of the world.”

“How does knowing any of this help us find last night’s Drifters or who’s controlling them?”

“We care for Saperes by seeding them strategically around the globe. If one is destroyed in Sumatra, the others remain safe while we scour the globe for its replacement. The three most proximate Saperes are in New York and Mexico City. Can you guess the location of the third one?”

“In Los Angeles,” says Brigitte.

“Bellissima. I assure you, the twenty-seven cities were not chosen willy-nilly. Each is a magical crossroads. Each is a power spot, Los Angeles being a distinctly active one.”

“You think if we find the Savant, it can help us?”

“If it wants to.”

“How can we make it want to?”

Cabal grins like a naughty little boy.

“Give it what it wants. What all the resurrected want.”

“You’re fucking joking.”

“I’m not telling you to gut some hapless soul. Go to an abattoir. Go to a boucher. Their desire is simply for fresh flesh. Human is the preferred fare, of course, but pig is close enough to man-flesh.”

“How do we find the Savant?” asks Brigitte.

“Call the number on the piece of paper I gave you.”

“You said that was Regina in Mumbai.”

“I lied.”

“Where is Regina?”

“Well, she’s certainly not chained up in my basement. That would be wrong of me. Still, Regina does tend to inspire the desire to lock her away somewhere deep and dark and full of more than an immoderate amount of spiders.”

I look at Brigitte. She shakes her head. I look back at Cabal.

“If you’re sending us into a trap, it’s not going to work. And even if it does work, just because I’m dead doesn’t mean I can’t get to you.”

“I’m exceedingly aware of your reputation, Sandman Slim. The phone number is true and leads to no trap that I know of. You’ll want to call soon. If anyone can point you to true north, it’s Johnny Thunders.”

“The singer?”

“No. The zombie, you dunce. Johnny Thunders is your Savant.”

He waves a tired hand in my direction. “Johnny’s minders will explain.”

If Cabal is lying, he deserves a teddy bear from the top shelf and the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. I’ve heard world-class whoppers and told a few of my own, but this guy is spinning sable from shit.

Or he’s just let Brigitte and me in on one of the world’s weirder secrets. If he’s lying, it would be a fun excuse to come back and punch holes in Castle Grayskull. But if he’s telling the truth, it would make life a lot easier.

“One more thing,” says Cabal. “There’s someone else you might chat with concerning the resurrected. Rainier Geistwald, Jan and Koralin’s son. He’s a clever boy, and while a genuine brat, his brains are more acute than he cares to let on. He’ll be an important man one day.”

Cabal stands up. This time he doesn’t offer his hand.

“I could say it’s been enchanting, but I’ve already told you one lie today. I couldn’t bear it if you lost all faith in me. You know the way out. Feel free not to linger. Ta-ta.”

He turns and disappears through the Sun wheel curtain without looking back.

Brigitte asks, “Do you think he is sending us to people who will try to kill us?”

“I don’t know. What would be more fun for him? Killing us right away or watching us bump into things and skin our knees?”

“True. Would you like me to call the number?”

“Let me. It’s my town. I should be the first one through closed doors.”

“How chivalrous.”

“That’s French for stupid, isn’t it? That’s okay. If we have time, I’ll give you a demonstration of naked jousting.”

We leave through the Room and back to her car. She doesn’t ask any questions this time.

BACK IN FRONT of Max Overload, Brigitte leans over to kiss me, and this time I’m not shy about kissing her back. Cabal’s act sucked the paranoid jitters right out of me. Sometimes annoyance will keep you going when booze and fear and hope are as dead as the Big Bopper.

Brigitte says, “I could come up for a while if you like.”

“I would like, but you wouldn’t like. I have a roommate.”

She smiles.

“Does he like to watch?”

“He’d love it. But he’s a kind of a spy and that means Lucifer would be watching us, too.”

“What do I care? Lucifer probably has my calendar in his office in Hell.”

“It would be awkward for me.”

How do you tell someone you want to fuck that you can’t do it in front of the devil because you don’t want your dad spying on you?

“All right. I should probably be getting back anyway. But you owe me.”

“Before I forget, my roommate loves you more than beer and cigarettes. Would you sign these for him?”

I hand her the DVDs. She smiles and takes a pen from the glove compartment.

“Who do I make it out to?”

“Aldous.”

“What a lovely old name.”

“I’ll tell him you said that. It’ll make his week.”

“There’s something for you under the seat.”

I reach down and feel along the carpet until I touch a box. I pull it out and open it. Inside is a collapsed metal weapon.

“The gift that keeps on giving.”

Brigitte hands me the DVDs.

“I want to go back to Springheel’s house and look around soon. Want to come with me?”

“Is there a bedroom?”

“I didn’t see one, but you can help me look.”

“Then count me in.”

She blows me a kiss, pops the clutch, and burns rubber back onto Hollywood Boulevard.

KASABIAN IS GOING through online video catalogs when I get back. Death Rides a Horse is playing on the other monitor.

“Did you remember cigarettes?”

“We didn’t get to a store. I bummed one off one of the kids working the register.”

“Which one?”

“I have no idea. They all look alike to me.”

I set the DVDs on his table.

“Don’t say I never gave you nothing.”

He grabs them in his little metal legs.

“You are my goddamn hero, man.”

“One more thing off my bucket list.”

The DVDs have him in a good mood and I don’t want to spoil it yet. I’ll wait to tell him that Wells fired me and either I start knocking over gas stations or we set up shop in the Dumpster next to the hand.

“How was your date?”

“It wasn’t exactly a date. We talked to a guy who yammered like he was gangbanged by a thesaurus. It’s all a big act, but he’s had a lot of practice. I don’t think I ever met a human before who could stretch ‘pass the peas’ into a hundred and fifty syllables. I once killed a Hellion who talked like that just to shut him up.”

“When Brigitte dumps you, you might not want to include ‘kills people who use big words’ in your personal ad.”

“What makes you think Brigitte’s going to dump me?”

He cocks his head in my direction.

“Gee, I don’t know. She dates billionaires and you live in an attic over a video store. She wants to get into big-time movies and you can get her free beer and tacos. You’re a monster and she’s a person. I can e-mail you a spreadsheet if you want to see the other five hundred reasons.”

“She won’t dump me.”

“Why not?”

“She hasn’t told me her real name and I haven’t told her what the Room is.”

He takes a beer from the fridge under his table and cracks it open.

“So, you’re finally done mooning over Alice. About time.”

Kasabian’s beer flies across the room and hits the wall before I realize it was me who knocked it out of his hand.

“Do not ever fucking say her name. Not now, not ever, unless you want to go back in the closet. And while you’re playing spy, tell Lucifer not to pull that shit with me either. People are after him and all I have to do is step out for a sandwich and let it happen.”

Kasabian is staring at me, shit scared. A deer head in the headlights. He’s quiet for what seems like a full minute.

He says, “I’m sorry, man. I overstepped.”

I take the cigarette from where I’d stuck it behind my ear and light it. Take a couple of puffs. Kasabian is still staring at me. I go over and hold the filter end of the smoke out to him. He doesn’t move for a second and then takes a tentative puff.

“Thanks.”

“Yeah.”

We finish it in silence.

I take beers from the fridge, give him one, and take the other to the bed.

Where did that slap come from? I haven’t heard Alice’s name out loud since I sent Mason Downtown. I’m trying not to think about her every time I close my eyes or make a decision. Not thinking about her is the same as getting over her, right?

“Tell me something. When you were doing Zombie 101 earlier, why didn’t you tell me about Savants?” I ask.

“What’s a Savant?”

I look at him. He’s not lying.

“Just something I heard. It might be a wild-goose chase, but it might not. When you’re in the Codex, keep your eyes open for Savant or Saperes.”

“Sure. In the meantime, I think I know something that’s going to make you feel better.”

“What’s that?”

“Whatever you said to Lucifer at the studio shot a bottle rocket up his ass. He’s been sending me into the Codex all day. Looking at sections I didn’t know were there. Digging through footnotes and diaries and commentaries. Some of the writing is old. Like beginning-of-time old. Some of it’s written in an angelic script I bet even Mason never saw. I think it might be the first one. The original script. The first writing for the first language in the universe.”

“Hallelujah. I’ll buy the cherubs a lap dance when this is done. But right now, I’m up to my ass in little fortune-cookie facts and I don’t know how any of them go together.”

“Here’s something. The big man had me do a brain dump on you and he saw the drawing you did of the belt-buckle thing. Know what happened?”

“He ordered one from QVC?”

“He freaked the fuck out. It was so strong I felt it. I mean, we’re supposed to have a one-way communication system. I send and he receives. But when he saw that drawing, the blowback out of his brain went all the way up the line and back into me.”

“So, what is it?”

“I don’t know yet. The writing around the edges is more of that old angelic script. I can’t read it yet, but I’ll figure it out.”

“Whatever it is, this means that Lucifer knows that I know about the belt buckle.”

“Yeah, but I can block things from him. All he knows is that you saw the image. He doesn’t know you really saw the thing or know where it is. If I were you, I’d move my ass and get it. Whatever it is, the buckle is strange enough to scare Lucifer and it’s definitely connected to the zeds.”

“Let me finish my beer.”

“Of course. The end of the world can wait.”

NO, I GUESS it can’t. I go through a shadow and into the boarded-up movie theater with the bottle in my hand, finishing the last dregs of the beer. The place is dead black when I get inside. The owners must have done a better job sealing the place up after the cops came by. I just hope they didn’t clean it. I throw the bottle at the wall and wait for the crash. But there isn’t one. Just a dull thud as it hits something soft. I get out Mason’s lighter and spark it.

The beer suddenly tries to come back up my throat. It’s not like wanting to puke. It’s more like the beer is smarter than me and it wants to run away and leave my dumb ass where it’s standing.

The bottle didn’t smash because it didn’t hit the wall. It didn’t hit the wall because it hit a zed. Or a Lacuna. I can’t really tell the difference, but this would be a good place to learn about them because there are about a hundred Drifters mobbed together maybe twenty feet away.

I lurch halfway back into the shadow when I realize that I don’t have to. None of the shamblers are looking in my direction. Not even the one I hit with the bottle. They’re just standing in a big circle among the seats. A few moan quietly, but it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with me. They’re all looking down at the same spot on the floor. I think I know what they’re looking at.

The gun and the na’at aren’t going to do me much good in these close quarters and I don’t want to use any hoodoo on the off chance it’ll break the buckle’s hypnotic hold on these meat sticks. What I really need is about a hundred pounds of C4, but I must have left it in my other coat. I get out the black blade. It’ll be hard to use, but better than nothing. If the belt buckle is at the center of the mob, I’ll have to put away the knife to get it. But until I’m sure, I’m staying ready to slice and dice.

I take a couple of steps closer to the mob. It’s a mixed bunch. Some of the dead are very recent. They look like regular civilians who’ve missed a night or two of sleep. Others aren’t much more than gristle and bones in decaying rags. A lot of the older ones are eyeless, so whatever brought them here must be pretty powerful hoodoo.

I’m right behind them now. I could touch the one in front of me without stretching my arm. He’s wearing shorts and sandals and an orange “I’m Not as Think as You Drunk I Am” T-shirt.

I put the knife to the back of his neck. If he so much as twitches, I can take his head off and slice up the nearest ones enough so the others will trip on them when they come for me. But I don’t have to do anything.

Slowly and steadily I shoulder my way between the stinking dead, inching toward the center of the room. I keep the knife up, but none of them have the slightest interest in me. They’re all hypnotized by what’s on the floor.

It feels like it takes a week to get to where they’re all looking. And there it is, lying on an altar of broken glass and crushed Mickey’s malt-liquor cans. Eleanor’s belt buckle.

I’m sorry I ever doubted you, Eleanor. I should have known that the stunt in public with the flamethrower and the mad dash home to the theater weren’t accidental. You wanted to get caught. You wanted someone to find you and whatever it was you’d stolen and kill you for it so Mommy and the rest of the Sub Rosa would know what you’d done and what happened to you. That’s a lot of pain for a kid to be hauling around. It makes me not mind you frying my arm so much. I know what it’s like to want to cook the world. I’m sorry I didn’t figure it out sooner, but, for what it’s worth, I’m here now, and if I don’t end up a Quarter Pounder with cheese in the next few minutes, I’ll take your buckle and do something with it. If I do end up eaten, well, I’ll buy you a Happy Meal in Hell.

At the center of the crowd, the Drifters are so packed together I have to knock a zed on his face to squeeze through. I freeze, waiting for the crowd to lunge. But the zed on the floor just stands up and goes back to staring. I know they can smell me. I’m sweating like a three-legged racehorse, but even now when I’m about to pick up their holy grail, they ignore me.

I’m in too deep to back off now. I put the knife back in my jacket and hold the lighter close to the floor so I get the buckle without wasting time. Crouching, I touch the edge, ready to back off at the slightest reaction from the Drifters. Nothing. I get my hand around the buckle and slowly lift it a few inches, then a foot off the ground. Still no reaction. Either I was wrong about the buckle or Drifter brains are so slow to process information it’ll take them a while to notice that the family jewels are gone. I hope it’s the second one.

I slip the buckle into my coat pocket, but keep one hand under my coat. Slowly, I push my way through the Drifters back the way I came. They stay put, though the moaners are getting louder.

Without warning, they all step forward at once. They sense that the talisman is gone and want to get closer to where it was and soak up the residual hoodoo. There’s a hundred or more of them trying to squeeze into a space about the size of a phone booth. I lean forward and put my shoulder into them. I have to use all my weight to move forward. I’m getting through, but the farther back I go, the more they press forward.

The mood is changing. The place was a church when I got here. Cool and contemplative. Getting the buckle wasn’t much worse that pushing to the front of the stage at a hardcore club. Now the air is getting bad. Jittery with panic and confusion. I’ve been here before. I know what’s coming. Time to de-ass the premises.

Fuck close quarters. I pull the .460 from its holster and pop a shoulder-level shot between two zeds I want to move. The blast knocks one off its feet and rips the other’s arm loose, so it’s hanging by a few strands of tendon. With just the loose limb in my way, I push past them without slowing down. I need out of here ASAP and get into a rhythm about it. Take a step. Blow open a porthole. Take a step. Fire. Step. Fire. It’s working. I’m moving faster now. My only worry is slipping on corpse leakage or a severed arm.

Just as I’m about to step out of the circle, it tightens. Pins me where I am. I can’t even raise my arm to shoot.

Then the mob relaxes. The magic in the center of the room is gone and they have no reason to crowd there anymore. I break free of them and head for a wall. It’s taken me longer to get out than I counted on. Plenty of time for even these rotten brains to figure out that something is going on and look around for what. I have a bad feeling that if I turn around, a hundred pairs of dead eyes will be aimed straight at me and what’s in my pocket.

“Who the fuck are you, motherfucker?”

I know it’s stupid, but I can’t help it. I turn and look.

So that’s what a Lacuna looks like. Cabal was right. I wouldn’t notice him in a crowd. He’s in a double-breasted gray suit, and if it wasn’t for all the dried blood on his jacket from the ragged bite mark in his neck, I wouldn’t look at him twice. He’s looking at me like a starving wolf. Like he’s trying to read the theater marquee through my chest. Blank-eyed shamblers behind him are turning this way.

“I said, ‘Who the fuck are you?’”

I take a step back and hold the lighter so he can see my face.

“You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man.”

He rushes and the mob follows; a tsunami of black, broken teeth and putrid meat crashes down on me.

But chatty and bright as the Lacuna is, he’s still a dumb, dead piece of shit. When he rushes me, my back is already to the wall and I’m stepping through it. He’s not going to make it in time. He’s going to be the smartest deli slice in the slaughterhouse when those other hundred Drifters splatter him against the wall like a car crusher. Good thing he’s dead or it might hurt.

RITCHIE’S PLACE IS in Laurel Canyon. Back in the sixties, rich hippies, movie moguls, and famous bands lived up here. Between the dope, their biker friends, the Manson wannabes, and all the free love that was never really free, the place turned into The Killing Fields with a Jefferson Airplane sound track. Don’t you want somebody to love? They were Khmer Rouge in designer jeans, and when the dope and the money ran out the canyons and deserts bloomed over the bodies they buried there.

I drive up the winding road to the address Brigitte gave me. I’m in a stolen Lexus because I want to be boring tonight. And I don’t want to take Brigitte back through the Room if I can help it. Eventually she’s going to ask questions I don’t want to answer.

It’s about 2 A.M. when I stop in front of Ritchie’s gates. I can see the house at the end of a long circular drive. It looks like a claw machine in an arcade plucked an Italian villa off a hill in Rome and dropped it down in the middle of the manzanita and coyotes. The place is pretty, but looks ridiculous here. Like something you’d build to win a bar bet.

Brigitte is waiting for me in the shadow of a eucalyptus. She’s holding her leather jacket tight around her to keep out the canyon cold. She should have something heavier, but when you’re sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night like a teenybopper running off for backseat groping with your boyfriend, you can’t exactly take the time to squeeze into Lancelot’s armor.

She gives me a quick kiss when she gets in and immediately starts playing with the car heater.

“How does this work?”

“I have no idea. How is Ritchie not going to notice you’re gone?”

“I put a powder in his drink. An old family mix and not at all harmful. He’d probably approve if he knew. It’s all organic.”

I take her down the hill the way we came, then head for Springheel’s place. The heater is going and she starts to relax. She opens the glove compartment and pulls out the contents into her lap, like a kid going through her Halloween candy. I spot a pack of cigarettes.

“Score.”

“Take them. I quit before coming to L.A. Rich men like their girls pure inside and out.”

“Darlin’, purity has nothing to do with why Ritchie went for you.”

“You know what I mean. Trophy girlfriends have to make you look good in front of your friends. Here that means no smoking. The next place I go hunting, it will be somewhere like France or Japan. Somewhere they don’t believe they’ll live forever if they give up everything that gives them pleasure.”

“Speaking of you hunting, I still don’t know much of anything about you. You’re like Van Helsing in drag, but you have a whole public life on video. How does your life go that way?”

“What don’t you understand? The revenants or the pornography?”

“I understand the porn. Lots of Sub Rosa and Lurkers do it out here. But I’ve never met a professional Drifter exterminator before. How does that end up the family business?”

“The Hussites ate my grandmother.”

“That was going to be my second guess. What are Hussites?”

“Protestants. They were angry over corruption in the Church and the Church rewarded them by burning their leader, Jan Hus, at the stake. My village didn’t care. They were all fools to us. But the Hussites and the government went to war, and monsters, which love nothing more than chaos, came with them. One evening, a Hussite band came to our village. They took as much food as they could carry and some goats and left. We cursed them, but would have saved our curses if we had known what was to follow. More soldiers came, but these were different. They were ragged and stank of death. Some were little more than bones and none of them spoke. Grandmother was a čarodějnice. A witch. She and the other old women, with nuns from a local convent, went together to drive off the ghost soldiers. They carried Bibles and my grandmother and the old women carried potions and magical objects. None of them ever returned.”

“Damn.”

“Two days later, a few of the women and the nuns returned, including Grandmother. But it was not really her. She was nude. The flesh from her breasts, her belly, and her legs had been eaten away. Most of her face was gone, but Grandfather recognized her and went to her. She gouged out his eyes and devoured him in the main room of our little house, under the crucifix her mother had given them at their wedding.”

“You didn’t have to kill them yourself, did you?”

“This happened six hundred years ago, so no, I didn’t, but we still remember.”

“So your people decided to go after the ghost soldiers.”

“The bravest, boldest men went after them that night. They all were eaten or turned into revenants themselves. Other men were able to capture a few of the beasts and, over time, we learned how to destroy them. After that, my family were no longer farmers. We were killers. Like you. And like you, we do whatever we have to do to live and continue our work.”

“You don’t have to justify anything to me.”

“I know. That’s why I’ll tell you this. Normal people, Simon’s sort of people, wouldn’t understand.”

“You definitely win the deep-dark-secrets competition. I never hid anything that good.”

“What about your magic? You must have kept that secret.”

“I didn’t know any better when I was a kid, and by the time I figured it out, it was too late.”

“Poor Jimmy. Full of magic and happy to use it. Doomed to beat the boys at all their games and do tricks for the girls to make them kiss you.”

“I didn’t have a car. I had to do something.”

“I’ll light a candle for you.”

“Don’t waste the wax. They don’t take my calls anymore.”

I get Brigitte to hold the wheel while I tap out a cigarette, light up, and take a big puff. Instantly, I’m Doc Holliday trying to cough up a lung.

“God. They’re menthols.”

I toss the rest of the pack, including the one I’m smoking, out the window. I’m doing the Lexus owner a favor ditching those nerve-gas sticks. He’ll whine when he realizes they’re gone, but sometimes tough love is the only answer.

The street across from the vacant lot on East Sixth is empty. I kill the engine and the lights and we sit for a minute watching the place. In the moonlight the Springheels’ hovel looks like a cardboard cutout left out in the rain. I don’t see anyone standing guard.

Brigitte leans across me and looks out the window.

“That’s the house of an important family?”

“The most important once upon a time.”

“I think you Sub Rosa have a different sense of beauty than other people.”

“You get used to it. Like herpes or a missing leg.”

“I want to see inside.”

“Not yet. I need to do something first.”

I grab a bag from the backseat, get out of the Lexus, and go around to the passenger side. Brigitte watches as I dump a pile of powders, plants, and the piece of lead I use for certain kinds of circles.

“Lovely. I get to see magic?”

“You get to see magic. I hope these ingredients are still good. They’re Kasabian’s. My roomie’s. He hasn’t done this kind of hoodoo in a long time.”

“What kind does he do?”

“He shits out of his neck.”

Brigitte stares.

“I’ll explain later.”

There’s a mortar and pestle in the bag. I pass them to Brigitte along with a bag of ingredients.

“Take these leaves and seeds and grind them up into a powder. I need to go be da Vinci.”

I take the lead and draw a circle in the car’s shadow so it will be hard to see if someone wanders by. The image isn’t complicated. A pentagram facing north inside a double circle. Outside the circle I scribble words in Latin, Hebrew, and Hellion. Not a spell. More a friendly “hi and thanks for stopping by” kind of stuff. It’s pretty random, but better hoodoo than it sounds. If you think it’s easy saying anything in Hellion that doesn’t come off as a veiled threat, you’d be wrong. I suck at milk-and-cookies magic, but I need to attract as much wildlife as possible without blowing it up.

“Your powder is ready. What kind of magic are we doing?”

“The Vigil will have left an alarm on the house. Probably angelic, and those detect conscious life. That’s animals, insects, and us. Anything can go inside or be magically controlled to go inside. We can’t turn the alarm off, but we can give it a migraine.”

The powder goes into the center of the circle and I lean over it to whisper some bits of greeting magic I sort of halfway remember. Brigitte is smiling, trying not to laugh. I look like I’m whispering sweet nothings to a pile of dirt, not exactly the two-fisted hoodoo she was counting on.

When I get tired of cooing to the pavement, I dump powdered sulfur onto the pile and mix it all together with my hands. Get out Mason’s lighter, spark it, and throw the mess up into the air as hard as I can. I touch the flame to the tail end of the cloud and the sulfur catches, igniting a twenty-foot pillar of fire.

The fire is gone as quickly as it came, but by the time the last powder embers hit the ground, I can already hear what I was hoping for.

Around us and above us there’s a rustling sound. The birds arrive first, settling into the vacant lot by the house, chirping, cawing, and pecking at the ground. Rats and mice swarm out of the sewers and warehouses, followed by insects. The crawlers cover the ground like a massive undulating carpet and the fliers drop from the sky like a black, glittering fist. Cats and dogs, the smartest animals of the bunch, so the hardest to convince, get there last. They head right for the house, circle it, mark the boards, and climb onto the roof. The birds and insects finally get the idea and head in that direction. As soon as they’re moving, I grab Brigitte’s hand and we start to run. The animals know we’re coming. Yeah, they’re dumb, but this is hoodoo and it would be a pretty shit spell if you ended up crushing all the wildlife you’d just called.

The bugs and mice and rats part like the Red Sea and Brigitte and I run through the field to the house. By the time we’re there, the walls and roof are a solid mass of feathers, fur, and shiny carapaces. There’s no way the alarm can read and separate this much life at once. I pull out the na’at as we go up the steps and slash the lock. The door swings open on its own. It’s dark inside. Brigitte gets out her flashlight. I take her back to the kitchen and out through the missing porch. She gasps when she finds herself in the Springheels’ sprawling California ranch house.

“This is beautiful.”

“If you’re Ronald Reagan, I guess.”

“The idea of it, I mean. The beauty hidden within the rot.”

“Sure. That’s what I meant, too.”

I find the lights as Brigitte wanders around the living room touching the furniture, then going to the big windows that open out over the desert.

“I’d like to see the desert.”

“It’s not hard to get to from L.A. Maybe I’ll show you sometime.”

“Maybe.”

There’s a big side table against the wall across from the windows. I go through all the drawers. I’m not looking for clues. I’m looking for the half pack of stale Marlboro Lights I find in the middle drawer. I take a long sniff and I’m in love.

“Junkie,” says Brigitte.

“I’m not addicted. I just want to be able to inject these directly into my brain.”

“We didn’t come to the house so you can loot it, did we?”

“No. I did a demon reading where Springheel died. I just want to make sure I was right.”

“Why wouldn’t you be?”

“It was crowded and noisy. Good distractions if you want to keep someone from finding something.”

“Why would you be invited and asked to examine something if you weren’t supposed to find the truth?”

“I’ve been wondering about that. Maybe it was a test to see if a crime scene was covered up well enough. Maybe I’m being set up to be the fall guy if it wasn’t demons back there.”

“I have tools with me that will tell us if revenants were present.”

We go to the room where Enoch Springheel was chewed up like human jerky. I keep an eye on Brigitte when I flip on the light. The Vigil tidied up a bit, but Springheel’s sex magic altar is still there and the bloodstain on the floor is as wide as a king-size bed. Brigitte doesn’t flinch. Her heart and breathing are rock steady. She’s walked into a lot bigger messes than this. That means she’s been telling the truth. Also it means that whatever we find, I won’t have to babysit her.

“What sort of demons do this damage?”

“Eaters.”

She nods.

“This wouldn’t be the first time someone has confused demons and revenants. Or used one to cover up the other.”

“It would be a first for me and it better be the last.”

Brigitte sees Springheel’s altar and heads right for it.

“These things are for very dark magic. Do what you are going to do. I want to watch.”

“It’s not hard, but it’s messy. You might want to step back.”

She goes and stands by the door. I get out a plastic bag of dry skin I scraped off Kasabian’s Hand of Glory and use the black blade to cut my palm and let a few drops of blood fall into the bag. I squeeze the bag to work the blood into the skin, pour the mess into my hand, and then scatter it over the magic hexagon. I take the bottle of whiskey off Springheel’s altar, get a mouthful, and spit it onto the Hand of Glory dust and wait. In a few seconds green and black smoke curls up from the floor like miniature prairie fires.

I look over at Brigitte and shrug. “I wasted your time. I was right. There were demons here.”

Brigitte takes a glass vial about the size of a lipstick container from her pocket. She shakes it and says, “Turn off the light.”

She throws the container as I hit the switch. The vial crashes somewhere on the other side of the room and something begins to glow. Pale blue spots glimmer on the floor like blood spatter. They’re all over the hexagon and extend away into the dark room.

“What is that?”

“The essence left behind by a revenant.”

“Demons and Drifters were both in here? Can you tell how long ago it was?”

Brigitte kneels beside the glowing pattern and smudges some onto her fingers.

“A few days. Less than a week. That’s as close as I can judge.”

“Same thing with the demon marks.”

I flip the light on.

“I’d like to know which was here first and who came after.”

“Does it matter? You have proof now that you were right,” says Brigitte.

I take a shot of the smoke with my phone.

“But I was wrong, too. Demons fade to the immaterial world when they’re not summoned, but if Drifters were in here, where are they?”

“They could have wandered out or been led away.”

“What the hell is going on? None of this makes any damned sense.”

“Let’s discuss it somewhere else.”

“Like where?”

“Somewhere more comfortable. We’re done here, but Simon won’t be up for hours. Take me home. I want to see where you live.”

She reaches down and grabs my cock through my jeans, gets up on her toes, and kisses me. I lean down to her, slip my hand around her ass, and pull her into me.

I see Kasabian’s beer bottle crashing into the wall and me yelling, “Don’t say her name.”

No. I’m not going to feel bad every time I touch another human being. I’m the one who’s still alive on this rock. I won’t apologize for wanting to feel like a person every now and then.

But this is pretty fucked up even for me, making out in the room where someone was ripped to pieces and eaten a few days ago. We’re standing where his blood was pooled like black custard.

“I can’t do this here.”

“Are you sure you’re the man who lived in Hell for all those years? You’re awfully delicate sometimes.”

“And you’re pretty hard core. Does anything get to you?”

“Not this. I was helping my father hunt when I was seven. I’ve seen bodies in every state imaginable.”

“Well, I’ve been the guy torn up on the floor. I don’t want to kiss you here. Let’s get out. I’ll get Kasabian some beer and smokes and he can spend the night in the closet.”

I loop my arm around Brigitte’s shoulder and steer her toward the door. We’re just about clear when she stops.

“What?”

“I want to see something on the wall.”

She swings the door half closed and doesn’t move for a moment.

“This is a very old sigil. A revenant clan. People who took revenants into their families with dreams of immortality.”

“Let me see.”

I step around and there’s the sigil. The writing is different, but the design looks a lot like Eleanor’s belt buckle. But the paint job isn’t right. Everything else in the room, as screwy as it might be, is put together well. The big, toothy monster face on the wall was spray-painted fast and sloppy, like a kid tagging his school at lunch.

“Are you sure?” I ask.

“Definitely.”

I push the door closed to get a better look. When it shuts, there’s a sharp metallic click. Brigitte gives me a funny look. A thin metal strand leads from the top of the door frame across the ceiling. A tripwire rigged to go off when the village idiot closed the door to look at the wall. This is why I hate working with other people. They see things. I don’t look, so I don’t set off traps. Curiosity didn’t kill the cat. Other people did.

There’s a grinding and the floor vibrates as a section of the far wall slides away. Fluorescent lights blink on in the deep black. It’s just a basement. Springheel’s secret room. The walls look like they’re carved out of solid rock. Someone’s been working down there. A wall is open and fresh dirt and rocks are scattered on the floor.

I hold up my phone to get a shot of the room, but someone gets in the way and it’s not Brigitte.

I don’t have to look to know who. I can smell them.

Zeds pour out of the basement like army ants protecting their territory. There’s just enough time to get out the na’at and collapse it to a couple of feet, leaving the thorns exposed so that when I swing it, it’s like a morningstar.

I catch the first one on an upstroke, crushing its face and jamming its jaw up into the bones around its eyes. The second gets it on a downstroke. One of the barbs catches his skull just above his forehead, his head opens up, and everything inside spills out. After that, I don’t notice individual blows anymore. I’m swinging the na’at like a street sweeper, trying to clear some room on the floor so that I can actually fight. With each swing, the na’at sends bone and meat flying.

“Get the door open,” I tell Brigitte.

“It is.”

There are just too many of them and more pour from the room. I could slash and smash all day and I’d end up right where I am.

I yell, “Get down!” and bark some Hellion arena hoodoo.

All the air in the room gets sucked into a central point above our heads, pulling the Drifters back with it. I knew it was coming, so I leaned the other way, and when the vacuum lets up, I drop to the floor. Brigitte is already down.

“Cover your eyes and hold your breath.”

Above us, all the oxygen sucked up to the top of the room explodes. A fireball blows down from the ceiling, frying everything that’s more than a couple of feet off the ground.

Even with my eyes closed, the flash leaves me seeing spots. The Drifters are a pile of crispy, twitching Manwich meat. I look around for Brigitte. She’s on the floor where she dropped. She shoots me a sooty killer’s smile. She never sees the little girl coming up behind her.

The girl looks like she’s around five or six. She’s in a long pink-and-yellow party dress and there’s a wilted pink rose in her tangled hair. When Brigitte pushes herself up to her knees, she’s just level with the princess’s head.

I’m running, but I know I won’t make it. The princess is too close. She opens wide and digs her rotten teeth into the back of Brigitte’s neck like a dog trying to break a rat’s spine. Brigitte falls and screams with the little girl on top of her.

I swing the na’at like a baseball bat. The princess rears up growling and the na’at slams into her mouth, snapping her head back and shearing it off at the upper jaw. The top of her head rolls away, but the rest of her hangs on to Brigitte. That doesn’t work out so well for her. Brigitte braces her legs against the floor and slams her back into the wall, pinning the headless princess. She spins and pulls her CO₂ gun, locks the kid’s writhing body against the wall with her knee, and fires a bolt straight down into the baby Drifter’s spine. Her back blows out and she stops moving.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that more Drifters are stumbling out of the basement. Some trip over their friends’ burned bodies. Some fall to their knees and gnaw on them. Some of the crispy critters on the floor start to move. Charred arms and legs pull away from the pile of scorched bodies and haul themselves across the floor like spiders. This is why fighting corpses sucks. They’re too dumb to know when they’ve lost and dead enough not to care.

“She bit me.”

It’s Brigitte.

“She fucking bit me, James. She’s killed me.”

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

I say it really reasonably, but Brigitte’s mind has gone bye-bye. She wades into the Drifters, kicking and pistol-whipping the ones walking point. She catches others as they come out of the basement, blasting bolt after bolt into their heads. I let her blow up a few skulls figuring it’ll calm her down, but the falling bodies just make her crazier, so I grab her shoulders and pull her to the door. She shoots until her gun is empty.

I get her as far as the living room before she faints. She’s bleeding bad. There’s a kind of shawl on the back of an old chair. I tear off a long section, wrap it around Brigitte’s neck like a scarf, pick her up, and head for a shadow. But there’s no door there. Just wall. Fucking Springheel must have put an antihoodoo cloak on the house. I carry her out through the kitchen.

Extra-crispy and original-recipe Drifters shamble from the back into the living room. Most of them get lost in the furniture and bounce around like pinballs, but some of the smart ones that can follow a straight line stumble after us. Eventually, the pinballs will bounce their way out of the front door, too. Nothing I can do about that now. I get Brigitte to the Lexus, put her in the passenger seat, and buckle her in. I get to the driver’s side cursing Kinski for being gone. We could use you and your magic glass right now, you prick.

Maybe a dozen Drifters are wandering around the vacant lot and there are more behind them. This neighborhood is all warehouses and pretty deserted even in the middle of the day, but it won’t take them long to wander into populated neighborhoods. Someone left them there like a land mine. It was going to go off sometime and I’m the asshole lucky enough to have set it off. How many more bombs did whoever spray-painted behind the door leave around the city?

Brigitte moans. I hit the gas and point the Lexus in the direction of Vidocq and Allegra’s.

I BEACH THE Lexus half on the curb outside the building, run to Brigitte’s side, and pull her out. The streetlight casts a fat shadow on one wall. I step through and come out in the apartment.

I don’t know what time it is. Probably three or four. All the lights are off. In my head, the room is still the same as when I left it eleven years ago, but it’s not my place and Vidocq has changed everything. I want to put Brigitte down on the couch, but I keep stumbling over chairs and piles of books. Fuck it. I start kicking anything that makes noise.

“Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!”

A light comes on in the bedroom. Allegra wanders out in an extra-extra-large Max Overload T-shirt. Vidocq follows, tying his robe.

“What time is it? What’s going on?” asks Allegra, rubbing her eyes.

Now that I can see, I carry Brigitte over to where they’re standing.

“She’s hurt and she’s lost a lot of blood.”

“Who is she? If she needs blood take her to an emergency room.”

“She isn’t hospital hurt. She’s Kinski hurt, but he’s gone, so you’re Kinski tonight.”

“What happened to her?”

“There was a metric assload of Drifters. One of them bit her.”

“What the hell? What’s a Drifter?”

“A High Plains Drifter.”

Vidocq clears his throat.

“He means revenants. Zombies.”

Allegra’s forehead creases in a frown.

“There really are zombies? Why doesn’t anyone tell me these things?”

“They’re extremely rare. I’ve only seen an outbreak once in this country and it was put down quickly.”

I say, “History later. A chunk of her neck is missing.”

Allegra points past me.

“Put her on the kitchen counter.”

She and Vidocq grab plates, utensils, and a cutting board and toss them on a nearby table. When there’s a clean spot, I lay out Brigitte, facedown. Allegra pushes the hair back from Brigitte’s wound. I put a kitchen towel under her so her face isn’t right on the tile.

“Eugène, get the first-aid kit from the bathroom. And the pharaoh grubs.”

He leaves. Allegra turns on a metal desk lamp she keeps there for reading cookbooks and potions. As she tentatively runs her fingers around the edges of Brigitte’s wound, she holds the light by her face.

“Who is she? Is she from the store? I swear I’ve seen her somewhere.”

“She’s Brigitte Bardo. You two probably watched some of her movies together.”

She pauses for a few seconds.

“Right. That’s it.” Her tone is slightly embarrassed. “What’s she doing here?”

“She’s in Lucifer’s movie.”

“Lucifer is making a porn movie?”

“She’s a trained zombie hunter, but she stays dressed for that, so there’s not that much money in it.”

Allegra hands me the lamp, goes to the sink, and washes her hands. By the time she’s finished, Vidocq is back with a canopic jar and a small white metal case stamped with a red cross. She opens a plastic bottle of Betadine and squirts it all over the wound, then takes a couple of big gauze pads from the first-aid kit and gently cleans it out. When she’s done she presses her ear to Brigitte’s back.

“It looks like the bleeding has stopped, but you’re right. By her color and heartbeat she’s lost a lot of blood. I can give her a general healing potion for the wound and a restorative for the blood loss.”

“She was bitten by a damned zombie. How about something for that?”

Allegra ignores me. She takes the lid off the canopic jar and I get hit with a smell that reminds me of the Drifters at Springheel’s. She upends the jar and a pile of fat, wriggling worms falls out. Each one is the size of my thumb.

“What are those?”

“Pharaoh grubs. They’re like maggots. They eat dead skin and leave clean, healthy tissue and they’re about ten times faster about it than maggots.”

Allegra puts several of the grubs on Brigitte’s wound. They go right for her discolored flesh. Vidocq puts his hand on my arm and raises it so I’m holding the lamp at a better angle for Allegra to work.

“Thank you, dear.”

“Of course.”

I look at Vidocq. Lit from below by the lamp, he looks old and tired.

“You’ve been around two hundred years, man. Tell me you know something to fix this.”

“I do know something. But I know that what you want doesn’t exist. There is no cure for the bite of a revenant.”

“You have all these books. How do you know there isn’t something you’ve missed?”

“I’ve read all these books many times and more besides. I’ve traveled the world hoping to cure my own involuntary immortality. I learned from magnificent alchemists, witches, and magicians. The few times the subject of revenants came up, all were in agreement. There is no cure. The best you can do is leave the afflicted in the Winter Garden.”

“No way.”

“Where’s the Winter Garden?” asks Allegra.

I say, “It’s not where. It’s what. He wants to put Brigitte into a fucking coma. Like suspended animation in a science-fiction movie.”

“It will stop the infection from consuming and killing her. It will halt her transformation.”

Allegra picks up a couple of the grubs.

“How long can you keep her like that?” she asks.

“In theory, forever. It will give us time to look for other possibilities.”

“You just said there weren’t any possibilities,” I say.

“There aren’t. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look.”

“I don’t like it.”

“No one ever does, but there’s nothing else to do. Unless you want to do nothing, wait for her transformation, and release her yourself.”

As Allegra packs the wound with cotton, Brigitte opens her eyes. Allegra gently holds her shoulders so she doesn’t try to get up.

“James?”

“Brigitte.”

“Where are we?”

“With friends. You’re all right. They’ll fix you up.”

“Bullshit. I’ve been bitten. Kill me, James. You can do it.”

“No I can’t.”

“I would do it for you. Please. Do it before I change.”

“No.”

“How many people have you killed? I’m going to be much more of a monster than you soon. Kill one more. Please.”

“Maybe. But not right now.”

Brigitte closes her eyes. I look at Vidocq.

“Do it. Freeze her.”

“Stark?”

It’s Allegra. Her voice is odd.

“What?”

“You’re bleeding.”

I look at my hands. Both are bitten and scratched. There’s a sliver of skin missing from my left palm. All the wounds are closed and scabbed.

“How ‘bout that.”

Vidocq says, “Jimmy, we must do it now. Both of you must go to the Garden.”

“Look at her and look at me. Her skin’s going blue. Her eyes are bloodshot. She’s dying. Look at me. Do I look any different from when you saw me earlier?”

“No.”

“I feel fine.”

“For now,” says Allegra. “What if you’re wrong and you change later?”

“Then you have my permission to kill me. You’ve got to kill the central nervous system. You don’t have the right tools, so the easiest thing for you would be to cut off my head and burn it and my body.”

“That’s what’s easiest? Great.”

Vidocq takes the lamp and shines it in my eyes. Checks my face.

“There might be a simple reason you aren’t changing. The Cupbearer’s elixir.”

“You think it’s keeping his body from changing?”

“It’s possible. There are accounts of similar occurrences. During the Great Plague there are stories of people who drank the elixir for various ailments. These people survived while whole towns died around them. You might be all right.”

Allegra goes to the shelves lined with potions and alchemical mixtures and brings a few bottles back to the counter. She looks at me and shakes her head. I don’t know if it’s because I won’t let Vidocq put me to sleep, because I dropped a half-dead woman in her lap, or because who knows what the devil’s kid is really up to?

“My offer still stands. If you think I’ve gone bad, take my head. But I’m not lying down for this right now. Someone told me that any spell cast can be broken and any spell broken can be put back together. Someone is making all this happen and I bet they can unmake it.”

“What if you can’t?” Allegra asks. “What if Brigitte is stuck like this forever?”

I look her in the eye.

“What would you want? Would you want to be Sleeping Beauty for the next thousand years until maybe perhaps pretty please someone figures out how to fix you or do you want to get it over with fast?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you think about it. You’re a woman and about her age, so you think about it and tell me what you’d do.”

“I don’t want that responsibility.”

“Too bad.”

I head back to the wall I came through earlier.

“Allegra, I might need you to come with me later and play Kinski one more time, but just to look. Not cut anyone up.”

“Whatever. Eugène and I will plant your friend in the Garden for now.”

“Text me when she’s under. And don’t leave the apartment for anything. It’s going to get dangerous outside. I’ll talk to you later.”

When I’m back on the street I dial Carlos.

“Hola Hula. You’ve got the Bamboo House of Dolls. Talk to me.”

“Carlos, it’s Stark. You need to listen to me.”

“What’s up, man? A buddy just brought me fresh sesos straight from the butchers. Swing by. You gringos don’t know shit about food till you’ve had auténtico street-style brain tacos.”

“Shut up and listen. Something’s happened. Close the bar. I don’t know if things are going to completely melt down out here, but there’s a real good chance.”

“It’s the fuckers from the other night, isn’t it? Those dead motherfuckers.”

“Yeah. There’s a lot more of them and I don’t know exactly how many. Until I do, stay off the streets. When you close, if any of your friends want to go home, let them. But once they’ve gone, lock up, barricade the place, and don’t let them back in.”

“Ay Dios mío.”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

I COME OUT of a shadow by the anime section in Max Overload. It startles two kids pawing through the cutout bin where the used and extra discs get dumped for a couple of bucks each. They look at me, more surprised than scared. I grab a couple of handfuls of movies and give them to each kid.

“Take ’em and go home. Stay there and don’t let anyone in. Things are going to get weird.”

I walk them to the door so none of the counter people tries to stop them.

“We’re closing early,” I tell the closest kid working the registers. He’s a pale pretty boy with a lopsided haircut that hangs over one eye. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says THE GOVERNMENT KILLED TUPAC AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT. I’ve never seen him before.

“Let these people take the damned movies. Just get them out of here. Then you and the rest of the crew take off. You’ll get paid for a full shift. If you’re smart you’ll go home. If you go somewhere make sure you know where all the exits are. Lock up on the way out.”

He just looks at me.

“Who the hell are you?”

“I own the place.”

He turns to the guy working the other register.

“Is he for real?”

The second kid glances at me.

“Yeah.”

“Cool.”

I head upstairs as guy two whispers to guy one. They don’t know that my hearing is better than theirs.

“I told you about him. He’s Mr. Kasabian’s boyfriend. Did you see all those scars? They never leave upstairs. No one knows what they do up there all day, but there’s always bloody, torn-up clothes in the trash.”

When I’m upstairs I lock the door.

“The revenuers onto you selling moonshine?”

I drag the bedside table over and wedge it under the doorknob. Get my lead out of the top drawer and sketch shield circles on the door and table.

“What’s going on, man?”

I open the closet that’s Kasabian’s bedroom.

“I know that running your board is most of the hoodoo you’re into these days, but can you use anything else in here, like a weapon or some antispirit rune stones?”

“What are you talking about? What’s going on?”

I sit on the bed, suddenly tired.

“We were ambushed tonight by a load of Drifters. Brigitte got bit. I got her out and over to Vidocq’s. But most of the Drifters got out in the streets. I don’t know how many, but by morning there are going be a lot more. I’m going to be running around trying to take care of this, which means you’re going to have to look out for yourself.”

“Fuck me.”

I’m hot and my head is throbbing. I toss the coat, the belt, and the gun on the bed and go to the bathroom. Half my face is smeared with soot from the barbecued zeds. I run water in the sink and wash my face. Drying off, I remember the wounds on my hand. I get an Ace bandage from the medicine cabinet and wrap it up. I don’t really need to. The cuts are all scabbed over, but I learned a long time ago that hand wounds and scabby knuckles tend to make people nervous. Since it’s vaguely flesh-colored, an Ace can keep people from noticing. And it isn’t as much trouble as throwing a glamour on the hand and trying to keep it there when you’re punching people in the brain.

“What are you doing in there? Talk to me.”

I bring a big bottle of Pepto with me and go back to the bed and down half of the pink sludge right away. Then I stretch out and drop the bottle on the floor because I moved the goddamn night table to the door. Rolling over to pick up the bottle, I get dizzy.

“What’s that on your hand?”

Kasabian might be dumb, but he’s not stupid.

“Oh shit. You got bit, too.”

“I’m fine.”

“I’ve got to get out of here.”

“Where? You going to call a cab to take you to LAX? Maybe the airline will give you a discount because you can fit in the overhead compartment.”

He looks at me.

“That’s cold, man. And for your fucking information, I’m going into the closet. You think I haven’t been waiting for you to flip out this whole six months, you crazy drunk motherfucker? I’ve been scratching spells in the walls. And I’ve been online loading up on protection charms whenever I ordered videos. I’m Fort Knox, man. I’m the goddamn Death Star.”

He looks at me. I nod.

“Actually, that’s a pretty smart idea. Go and lock yourself in. You have a phone in there?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Stay in there until I give you the all clear.”

“What if you don’t come back?”

“I’ll get Allegra or Vidocq to come and get you if anything happens to me.”

“Do they even know about me?”

“Sort of. No.”

“Great.”

“Don’t worry about it. Nothing is going to happen to me. I’m not human, remember?”

“Part of you is.”

“Not enough to matter. And all it means is I have a migraine. You don’t look any more appetizing to me now than when I first met you.”

“You’ve always been my dream date, too, Penelope. Just stay over there on the bed, dead man.”

“Do you remember where I hid the belt buckle?”

Kasabian rolls his eyes.

“You really are in good shape. It’s under the mattress at the foot of the bed.”

I move the mattress and pull it out. Toss it onto my coat. I don’t know what to do with it, but I want it nearby.

“Did you ever figure out what the writing on this thing was?”

“A little. Lucifer can read it and I used the bits and pieces I grabbed out of his head to find more stuff like it.”

“What does it say?”

“It’s a warning and a blocking curse. It’s keeping something from getting in somewhere. But I don’t know who or where.”

“Drifters?”

“Or Jehovah’s Witnesses. Or census takers. Or the Fuller Brush man.”

“When you figure it out let me know.”

“Sure.”