Broken Souls (17 page)

The rattling off of Aztec names is dizzying. “Out of all of those names I think I caught one,” I say. “Quetzalcoatl. Feathered snake god, right?”

He shakes his head. “You better start learning some names quick,” he says. “They’re family now.”

Much as I don’t like it I know he’s right. The names sound familiar but I haven’t had time to dig into all of them. Huehuecoyotl is a trickster, but Tlaltecuhtli is new to me. It took me years to learn all the names of the Voodoo Loa. Most of them are ones you won’t find in any books, and I doubt it will take any less time to learn these. Only I don’t think I’m going to have years to do it in.

“Okay, so Muerte figures out where the knife is and sends Sergei after it. But he decides not to give it to her. Goes off the reservation. Why?”

“See these bones?” he says. He kicks at one of the skulls on the floor and his foot sails through it. “These men were led by a priest who couldn’t get into his own heaven so he tried to take ours. Hoped to conquer us here the way his people conquered us in your world. From Mictlan he could have moved to any of our other kingdoms.”

“Didn’t get very far, did he?”

“He got plenty far. But I was able to cut him off from his weapon when I lured him down here. I think Sergei’s trying to do the same thing.”

“He probably could,” I say, thinking of Kettleman. “He’s got a guy in his head who probably knows how to do it. But that would take a lot of power, right?” That would explain why he wants the Ebony Cage.

“There’s another way,” Mictlantecuhtli says. I’m still having a hard time not seeing him as Alex. He doesn’t act the way Alex does, not exactly, but he doesn’t sound like a millennia-old death god, either. If that’s all because of how my mind is translating what he’s saying I should probably get my head examined.

“He takes my skin,” I say. “I have a connection to this place now, right?”

“Exactly. He also gets your turning into jade problem, so even if he does I doubt he’d last very long.”

“You know, this is educational and all, but I got priorities, and whether Sergei gets into Mictlan isn’t even on my list. So how is this even my problem? I need Sergei off my back. Then I can figure out what to do about your crazy ex-wife.”

“Or you can use your fucking brain and do both,” he says, snapping at me. “You’re either deaf or stupid. It’s your problem because you need that knife. It can kill gods, jackass. You need to kill her before she kills you and if he gets into Mictlan with it you’re never going to see it again.”

“No shit. But how the hell am I supposed to find him? If it’s a choice between getting dead now or letting him go and getting dead later, I’ll take later. I had one way to track him and that’s—”

The answer pops into my head. There’s only one place he could be right now. He needs the Ebony Cage. It wasn’t in the bar. I don’t know if Tabitha told him where it is or not, but if she didn’t there’s only one other person who would know where it is.

“Vivian,” I say. “He’s at Vivian’s. I need to get out of here. I need to get out of here now.” A pain like my chest is being torn open by red hot knives hits me as steps carve their way into the wall and up into a new hole in the ceiling. It almost knocks me flat but I catch myself before my knees buckle.

“I wouldn’t recommend you keep doing that,” Alex says. “It’ll just speed things up.” He looks up at the hole in the ceiling I just created. “That said, I think you’re getting the hang of this. Good luck. That should open up close to where you want to be right now.”

The pain fades as I step onto the staircase, not sure if it’s going to disintegrate under me if I don’t concentrate on it. I made this? It didn’t feel like when I cast a spell. It just happened. The stone holds my weight and doesn’t disappear underneath me.

“Remember to get that knife,” he calls behind me as I run up the stairs. “If she gets it we’re both fucked.” Right now I don’t care about the knife, I don’t care about the cage. I’m worried about Vivian.

And that I might be too late.

Mictlantecuhtli was right.
The hole I opened comes up on the sidewalk right in front of Vivian’s apartment building on Wilshire. Sergei already had a head start on me before I stepped into Mictlan. No telling if he’s already here or not. Without the orb to show me where he is, I’m flying blind.

I run to the building, pop the lock on the front door and go inside. Stairs next to the elevator. I head up to her floor taking steps two at a time. I’ve got the Browning drawn and a round chambered.

I push through the fire door on her floor and I can tell he’s already here. If the crowd of sleepy, panicked neighbors gathered around her door didn’t give it away, the sound of the fighting going on inside sure as hell does. I still have the Hi, I’m A COP sticker stuck to my chest and make the best of it, pushing my way through yelling, “LAPD.” They barely glance at the blood covering my shirt or register my sunglasses at three a.m.

“That was fast,” a gray-haired man in pajamas says. “I just called you guys.”

“Rich neighborhood,” I say. “What the hell’s going on?”

“We started hearing banging a few minutes ago,” an Asian woman in a bathrobe says. “I think it’s her boyfriend. They started arguing and then we heard that.”

“She has a boyfriend?” I say, surprised at my own anger. When the hell did that happen? I mean, okay. Six months since Alex died, I guess that makes sense. But how come I didn’t know about it?

“I think so,” the woman says, shrinking back from me. “I don’t really know.”

A tremendous crash comes from the apartment. There’s no point knocking and playing the LAPD card. Nobody inside is going to answer. I go to kick the door open and stop when I notice the wards on her door.

Of course she’d have the place warded. If I’m lucky the door just won’t break. If I’m not she could have it set to do something nasty instead. Being a doctor and a mage has given her a really ugly edge. I’ve seen the kind of magic she can do with diseases.

Okay, so how do I get in there? Brute force isn’t going to do me much good if I suddenly find myself on the floor puking my guts out and breaking out in boils.

And then, like a kid waving his hand around in class because he thinks he knows the answer, that dark power of Mictlantecuhtli’s rears its ugly head. I may not be a god. Not yet. But it seems I’ve got a god’s power.

“I have no idea what you think you can do,” I say, “but now’s a good time to do it.”

Pain flares through my chest. If I wasn’t ready for it I’d be on the floor screaming. Even knowing that it’s coming doesn’t help much. I stagger forward, my vision blurring from the agony. I try to brace myself against the door, but instead I just pass right on through it. I go solid again the second I’m through and the pain subsides, leaving behind an echo of itself that leaves me gasping for air. I wonder what the neighbors are going to think about that?

Vivian’s apartment is a mess. Furniture is overturned, books strewn across the floor. Vivian is behind a shield blocking something I can’t see that Sergei as Kettleman is throwing at her. His clothes are loose on him, the same ones he was wearing at the bar as the bouncer.

She’s wearing a bathrobe and her hair’s a mess and I’ve really missed seeing her and goddamn it why did everything have to go to hell and this really isn’t the time to be thinking about that so instead I shoot Sergei.

The bullets get about three inches from him and stop dead, clatter to the floor. I didn’t really expect it to work, but I’m still disappointed. At least it distracted him enough that he’s stopped his attack.

He turns his attention to me as Vivian lowers her shield. I pop another couple rounds at him. They may not get close but he flinches and in that split second of distraction Vivian hits him with a wall of force that slams him across the room.

Instead of shooting again I run at him. Whatever he’s got up keeps me from connecting but his shield is like a suit and it doesn’t keep me from wrapping myself around it. I get him in a bear hug, using my momentum to keep moving him across the room. The Kettleman form doesn’t have a lot of strength and he can’t break out of it.

He could magic his way out, I’m sure, but something that Gabriela said about how the forms the knife gives a person don’t actually change the way they think comes to mind. He might be wearing Kettleman’s skin and have his abilities, but Sergei’s still a brute force kind of guy. At least I hope he is.

He proves me right a second later when he bulks out into the bouncer. He’s a little lighter than I remember Sergei being, so it makes sense. Sergei in the bouncer’s clothes would be too tight, too restricting. I’m okay with that, because I’m hoping Vivian’s paying attention and will help me test a theory.

I let go as soon as he changes forms, letting him throw me off. I hit the ground and roll, getting as far away from him as I can. In this form he’s got strength, sure, but he doesn’t have any magic. His shield’s down. So when Vivian hits him with another blast it blows him straight out through the window of her fourth-story apartment.

He hits the glass hard, shattering it into a thousand shards. He scrambles, trying to grab onto anything. He changes from the bouncer to Sergei to some random guy I’ve never seen with a black crew cut and porn star mustache. I’m hoping he doesn’t change back to Kettleman. With my luck that fucker will probably know how to fly.

I run to the window and watch him fall, flipping back and forth through bodies and when he hits the ground he’s the bouncer. It’s a bad fall. Lands on his head and his neck snaps, his limbs whipping around and slapping the pavement below, their bones shattering as they hit. He lies there not moving, twisted into angles human bodies aren’t meant for.

Vivian runs to me, breathing hard, wide eyed, questions and accusations written on her face like newspaper headlines. She’s about to ask what the hell just happened, what the hell I have to do with it. How, whatever it is, it’s got to be my fault. I raise a finger, cutting her off.

“Wait for it,” I say.

“Wait for what?”

I’m hoping I’m wrong and that Sergei’s as dead as everybody whose skin he’s taken, but then the body convulses. Shivers and dances around like it’s being pumped full of electricity. Limbs right themselves, his neck snaps back into place. And when it’s all back, the skin he’s wearing, the poor, dead bastard whose only fault was trying to be a bouncer for a bar in Koreatown, sloughs off like melted wax, leaving a stunned and visibly shaken Sergei in its place.

I pop off a couple rounds from the Browning. I know I won’t hit him from this range, but you can’t blame a guy for trying. The gunshots shake him out of his stupor and he scrambles to his feet, a look of panic on his face. He bolts down the street.

“Yeah, you run you sonofabitch,” I say. I didn’t kill him, but now I know something I didn’t before. His skins can be killed. And when they do they fall apart. So he’s down one. Too bad he didn’t hit the ground as Sergei. Might have saved us all a lot of trouble. Or Sergei might just be another skin at this point.

“What the hell happened?” she says. “Who was that?”

“Are you all right?” I say. I look her up and down. She’s got a nasty cut on her cheek and her right temple is bruised.

“I’m fine,” she says, pushing my hand away. “What’s going on, Eric?”

“His name’s Sergei Gusarov,” I say. She gives me a blank look. Well, at least I’m not the only person who doesn’t know who the hell that is. “He’s trying to get the Ebony Cage. He already hit the bar.”

“The bar? When? Is anybody hurt?”

“Couple hours ago? I think? My time sense is a little off. Tabitha’s in the hospital, she’s—Well, she’s alive. I made sure she got into an ambulance. It’s kind of complicated.”

“What hospital?” She picks her way past the debris on the floor, roots around until she finds her cell phone.

“UCLA Westwood,” I say. “I think. It got a little weird.”

“With you around? Of course it did.” She starts punching buttons. “Goddammit. I knew that thing was bad news. I told Alex to get rid of it.” She starts shaking, closes her eyes and wills herself to stop. It mostly works, but the adrenaline is still in her system and she can only do so much.

“I thought that was Max,” she says. So that was the bouncer’s name.

“It sort of was.”

She holds up a finger, cutting me off from saying more as someone answers her call. “Hi, Nancy, this is Doctor Winters.” She pauses. “Yeah. I’m calling about a patient who should have been brought in to the ER a little while ago. Korean woman. Tabitha Cheung.” Pause. “Yeah, I’ll hold. Thanks.”

She turns back to me. “What do you mean it was sort of him?”

“It’s going to take me longer to explain what the hell is going on than I’ve got. So short version. The guy we just shoved out the window has a knife that can steal a person’s form, memories, everything. It kills them in the process. He got to Max to get to you and Tabitha. Did you tell him where the Ebony Cage is? I know it’s not in the bar, anymore.”

She stares at me, a dozen questions lighting across her face, decides against all of them. “Yes. It’s in a storage unit. I knew there was something wrong when he started talking about the cage. I’d never told him about it and Alex swore he’d never tell any normals about it, either. But I didn’t realize that until I’d told him where it was. He doesn’t have any of the codes to get inside, though.”

Shit. I was hoping he didn’t have the location. “And then he changed?”

“Yeah. Into the old guy. Is that Sergei?”

“No,” I say. “The guy who walked away from the splat on the sidewalk was Sergei. Old guy was Harvey Kettleman.”

“Thought he looked familiar,” she says. “Jesus. He used to hang out with my parents—Wait. Does that mean he’s dead, too?”

“Few nights ago. Up at Griffith Park. He almost got me, too.”

“What does this guy want?”

Telling her what I know would take too long, so I just shrug. “Don’t know, but he’s already gotten a lot of people killed. And if he’s after the cage who knows what he’ll do with it.”

“A storage place on Santa Monica Boulevard near Cahuenga. Let me write down the entry code.” She finds a pen in the mess on the floor and writes some numbers on a business card for a local restaurant. “If you need to get in these codes will do it.” She jots down some runes. “And these will deactivate the wards on the unit. You don’t want to go in there without doing that first. Whoever triggers it won’t live very long. Also, I had to put them up kind of quick. I was going to go back this weekend and do a better job.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means if you trigger them there’s a decent chance that whatever’s inside the unit will get hit, too.”

“Oh, Jesus, Viv.”

“Fuck you, I was in a hurry. And I didn’t think some psycho was going to skin my bouncer and try to kill me for it.”

“If these go off will they break the cage?”

“Maybe? How the hell should I know?”

“Does he have this information?”

“No, I didn’t give the codes to Max, Sergei— whoever the fuck that was.”

“Okay. I shouldn’t need to get inside, but he’s going to try.” I take the card from her and look at the runes. Some I recognize, others not so much. A combination of ancient languages and hermetic seals, they all combine into a pretty straightforward lock spell, but I can see some things in the patterns that make my skin crawl. “Jesus. Does this one mean ‘dysentery’? Whatever happened to do no harm?”

Her eyes go hard. “Hemorrhagic fever. And I tossed that shit out when my boyfriend died.”

“Vivian, I—”

“Stop. I know you didn’t kill him, but I also know that if it wasn’t for you he’d still be alive. So don’t even go there.” The person on the other end of the phone comes back on and she turns away from me before I can say anything.

“Hi Nancy,” she says. “No? Nothing’s come in all night?” She gives me a worried glance. “Okay. No, that’s fine. Must have the wrong hospital. I’ll check with Santa Monica. Thanks.” She hangs up the phone.

“They haven’t had any ambulances come in since around nine o’clock tonight,” she says. “You said Westwood UCLA?”

“Yeah, I—”

I’m interrupted by a banging on the door. “LAPD. Open up.”

“Shit,” I say. “I kinda told your neighbors I was a cop. Which might not actually cause as many problems as the fact that they saw me phase through the door.”

“You got any more of your stickers?” she says.

I pull one out of my pocket along with a Sharpie. “Always,” I say, as I uncap the pen and start writing.

“Then make yourself scarce.” I’m way ahead of her and slap a You Can’t See Me sticker over the one that says I’m a cop before she’s done talking.

“Coming!” she yells and runs to the door. She takes a deep breath, twists her face into one of panic and fear and a second later her eyes tear up. She’s a good actress, but I can’t imagine it’s all that hard right now. She’s just been assaulted in her own home. I know she’s holding things together well, she always has, but this can’t be easy.

She pulls the door open and immediately starts babbling at the two uniformed police. She contradicts herself two, maybe three times. A guy broke in the front door, went out the window. If it isn’t for the fact that she’s weaving a compulsion spell at the same time she’s talking to them I’d be worried for her.