Broken Souls (18 page)

As she leads them further into the living room, I slip past them unseen, hoping I can get to the storage unit before Sergei does.

I punch in Gabriela’s number
when I get outside. Sergei’s got to know I’m coming and he’s not going to be alone. No reason I should be, either. I scan the street for something fast and settle on a Z4 parked nearby. Gabriela picks up as I’m popping the lock and sliding into the driver’s seat.

“Tell me this is good news,” she says. “I’ve got a shitstorm going on over here and you’re not exactly my favorite person right now.”

“Jesus, is anybody ever happy to hear from me? Yes, I’ve got two bits of good news, as a matter of fact,” I say. “If you kill a skin that Sergei’s wearing it actually dies. Turns to jellied mush. Really disgusting.”

“You killed one of his skins? How?”

“Threw him out a fourth-story window. I was hoping he’d be wearing Kettleman or be himself, but no such luck. The skin sort of ran off him like melted fat. Also, he definitely can’t cast when he’s not wearing the Kettleman skin.”

“Good to know. Okay, so what’s the other good news?”

“I know where he’s going. Probably right now, in fact. Storage unit on Santa Monica and Cahuenga, to get that Ebony Cage. If he has anybody left in his crew I’d say it’s a good bet he’s going to hit it hard. The only plus is that it’s warded and he doesn’t have the exact unit number, so that’ll take him some time.”

“Santa Monica and Cahuenga? Hang on.” I hear a rustle of paper over the phone. “Okay, I know that place. Any idea why he wants this thing?”

I should probably tell her that I think he’s trying to break into Mictlan with it, but I’ve got an idea forming in my head and the less she knows about what’s really going on, the better. I need that knife. Whether Mictlantecuhtli is right about what Santa Muerte is doing or not, if that knife can kill her, I need to get my hands on it. And I really don’t think Gabriela’s going to be too crazy about that idea.

“No clue,” I say.

There’s a pause on the phone and I’m not sure she’s buying it. “Doesn’t really matter, I suppose,” she says. “I’m not fucking around this time. I don’t care who gets in my way, I’m taking this sonofabitch out. Got me?”

“I’ll try to keep my head down,” I say. As long as I can get my hands on that knife I don’t care what she does. But I really want to kill Sergei. “I’m on my way there now. Meet me a couple blocks away on—Christ, what’s down there?”

“Wilcox,” she says after a second. “Hey, how’s your girlfriend?”

It clicks what Vivian said in her apartment. The ambulance never made it to the hospital. I know it was supposed to go to UCLA Westwood. Would they have sent her to Santa Monica? That’s not much further, but it seems unnecessary when Westwood was right down the street. Even after my display of batshit crazy in the ambulance they would have taken care of her.

“I don’t know,” I say. “She was breathing when I left her.”

“That’s something,” she says. “All right, we’ll be there twenty minutes, tops. Don’t do anything stupid before we get there.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll wait until you’re there before I do anything stupid.”

Maybe.

___

It’s well past four a.m. and the morning is already gearing up. Delivery trucks and early morning commuters dot the road. The cops have washed away all the drunks and even the hookers on Santa Monica Boulevard have gone in for the night.

I drive past the storage building on the corner of Cahuenga, a twenties Deco building with a clock tower, painted-over windows, and a large parking lot in the back. I doubt they open for another few hours, but the loading doors for the buildings are wide open. The lot’s full of cars and about twenty guys standing around like they’re waiting for something to happen. This early in the morning it’s chilly, but these guys are all wearing long coats too warm for the weather. No doubt to hide their AKs.

It’s dark out and the Z4 has tinted glass, but I don’t linger too long lest they get ideas and decide to take potshots at me. I don’t sense anyone drawing power from the local pool, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any mages in that lot. It’s not like we wear hats that say “MAGICBOY”.

There are a handful of Dead on the streets. Couple murdered tourists, a bum or two. Not enough to cause me problems. I could pop over to the other side, walk right past all of them, and the only guy I’d have to deal with is Kettleman. I don’t see him in the parking lot, so he’s probably already inside. Pop up behind him and . . . Dammit, I wish I had my straight razor.

Fuck it. I drive around the corner and park out of view of the lot and dial Gabriela. Get her voicemail. “You know how I promised not to do anything stupid until you got here? Yeah, I kinda lied. I’m heading in. Look out for all the guys with AKs in the parking lot. They don’t look happy.”

I tell myself that this is a smarter approach, anyway. A bunch of people show up and there’s going to be bullets and screaming and any chance of surprise we might have is going straight down the toilet. This way I can get in quietly without having to worry about getting shot and get the knife without having to fight Gabriela for it. Because that’s really all I care about. Without it, Sergei’s useless. If he comes after me, well, he’s just a guy wearing a mage suit. I’m a fucking god in training.

And when Gabriela asks me about it, because I know she will, I’ll just tell her that I didn’t find the knife. He must have hidden it. And if they both happen to survive tonight, they can fight each other over it. With the knife, maybe I can finally get to Santa Muerte and finish this bullshit once and for all.

Once I’m out of the car I check for stray ghosts, extend my senses out to see where the closest ones are. The minute I pop over to the other side I’ll have a little while before they start coming for me and not long after that I’ll start attracting ones further out. Ten, fifteen minutes and this place is going to be crawling with the Dead. That should give me plenty of time to get into the building and up to the storage unit.

Relying on Mictlantecuhtli’s power is too unreliable, and I don’t want to do it too often and speed things along. And it fucking hurts. So if I need any more oomph to my magic I may need some blood. I rifle through the Z4’s trunk and find a box cutter shoved next to the jack. Perfect.

I wait until I’m close to the lot entrance before I slip over to the other side. The world goes a dull blue-gray and the sounds of the waking street around me disappear into a hollow echo chamber of howling wind. The objects around me glow or slip into shadow depending on how solidly rooted they are in the psychic landscape. The storage building itself glows like it’s lit with a blacklight, casting out a sense of solidity. It’s been here a long goddamn time. But the cars, streetlights and the car wash across the street all fade away into shadow.

The upshot of all this is that I can walk through the cars, some of the streetlamps and probably even the walls of the car wash, but the storage building is just as solid on this side as it is on the living side. Good thing they left the doors open for me.

I can see Sergei’s crew as indistinct blobs of man-shaped light. I can walk through them but it’s like stepping into a downpour of cold rainwater. I give them a wide berth and head into the building.

I take a flight of stairs up toward the fourth floor. The elevator won’t work for me. I could flip back and press the button, sure, but the minute that car starts moving it’ll leave me at the bottom of the shaft. Only the oldest elevators leave enough of a footprint to be solid on this side. I found that out the hard way on the second floor of an apartment building about ten years ago. Damn near broke my neck.

Past the second story I run into a problem. At some point not too long ago they changed out a section of the stairs and moved them in about ten feet. The new stairs are probably substantial enough to hold me, but I’m not entirely sure and they bleed so much into the old ones that I can’t tell where the boundary is.

Things get tricky on this side. It’s not so much a matter of whether something’s been around a long time as it is how much it’s been used and what people think about it. Take the Ambassador Hotel. Demolished back in 2005 to make way for a school, but on this side it might as well still be 1968 with Robert Kennedy bleeding out in a kitchen hallway.

Pretty soon the ghosts are going to start converging on this place and hunting me down. And if I flip back to the living side, I’m betting Sergei’s left some early warning alarms to tell him if anybody’s coming after him. Crap.

I step to the edge of the stairs I know are solid until they blur into the new ones, hope I gauged the distances right and keep going. Everything’s fine about five steps up and then my right foot misses the old stairs and disappears into the concrete.

The rest of me follows. It’s like stepping into an open manhole cover. My left leg buckles at the knee, slamming into the more solid steps, and I only manage to keep myself from going all the way through by shoving myself against the wall.

Takes a bit, but I manage to swing my right leg up and shimmy up the wall until I can find something solid to put my weight on. This is exactly why I don’t like to fly.

Not long and I’m back on the old staircase with only one more floor to go. I’m getting this itch on the back of my mind that’s telling me I’m running out of time. I can’t see them, but I can feel the ghosts outside coming from all over as they catch whatever passes for my scent in this place. They’re close.

It’s not like when I summon them and they pop in from all over. Most of them are walking, some of them, the ones that have enough consciousness and intelligence left over from their lives, have figured out that they can just will themselves from place to place. Fortunately, the psychic footprint of the building is going to get in their way just as much as it gets in mine. It’ll slow them down, but not by much. And I really don’t want to be caught in this stairwell when they come for me.

I step out of the stairwell onto the fourth floor and have to blink to adjust my eyes. The floor has been refitted so many times over the years that most of the walls are some degree of see-through. Plywood has been replaced with plaster and then drywall. The layout of the entire floor has been torn down and rebuilt. Hallways look like rooms look like doorways. It’s more confusing than H.H. Holmes’ murder hotel.

A wave of dizziness washes over me, but I shake it off. One of the dangers of being on this side too long. It saps your energy, your life, your will. I’m lasting longer than I used to, thanks, I suspect, to my new status as death god in training, but I’m still human enough that it’s getting to me. If I don’t slide over to the other side soon, I won’t have enough energy to do it at all.

I spy a couple of bright lights in the distance. One tall and broad, the other short and slim. Twenty bucks says that’s Sergei and his sister. If I’m reading the layout right I might actually be able to make a straight shot for them. There doesn’t seem to be anything all that substantial between us. I pop the blade on the box cutter. If I can get close enough to him, I can pop out and take him down before he knows what’s hit him. The sister could be a problem, but I might be able to grab the knife before she can react.

I’ll have to deal with the ghosts on this side, but if I can get a wall or two between me and her I can pop back onto the living side and head past most of the ghosts before I have to do it all over again to get past the goons in the parking lot.

Easy.

And that’s when the first ghosts come boiling out of the stairwell, howling for my blood.

A group of ghosts is a fraid.
No, really. I don’t know what jackass came up with that one, but it’s a real thing. A fraid of ghosts. Clearly, they’ve never seen a group of ghosts. Otherwise it’d be a “Pants-Shitting Terror” of ghosts.

They’re like sharks, and near as these ones can tell I’m chum in the water. They feed off life, those little scraps of experience and hope they can barely remember. Guy told me a while ago that as they fade it’s because they’re draining away to whatever final rest they’re going toward, like water circling a drain. I don’t know what’s on that other side for most of them, but to have your consciousness get stripped away from you like that must be agonizing.

They seethe out of the stairwell like a tsunami, every single one of them wanting a piece of me. One is annoying enough, but twenty will be like running me through a wood chipper. I knew this was going to happen. You hang out on this side for more than a couple of minutes and you will get their attention. I was just hoping I’d already have the drop on Sergei and his sister before they showed.

I have a choice to make. Lose the element of surprise and maybe get killed by the crazy Russian Wonder Twins, or stick around and definitely get killed by the ectoplasmic eating machines. Not much of a choice, really. I concentrate on the spell to flip me back over to the land of the living.

Nothing happens. It’s like turning the key in the ignition on a cold morning. I can feel it clicking, but it doesn’t turn over.

I don’t have time to try it again before they’re on me. I turn tail and run. One of the ghosts takes a swipe at me that clips the back of my neck. I feel a flare of icy pain as its fingers connect. I push past the pain and keep running.

With so many tear-downs and rebuilds on this floor it’s hard to tell which walls are psychically weak enough to pass through and which are old and solid. There’s too much visual clutter. I make a best guess and go down what looks like a collection of store rooms, but over here they could just be old overlapping walls that don’t exist anymore.

I’m feeling the effect of the entropy that’s sapping my power, but I should be able to pop back over to the other side without a problem. So what the hell is blocking me?

Sergei. With Kettleman’s memories he knows who he’s up against. Little fucker must have set a trap for me knowing full well that I’d try this trick. Probably has some spell running on this side that’s acting like a signal jammer keeping me from crossing back. So where is it and how do I shut it off?

Any wall I can go through the ghosts can go through, too, and they’re on my trail like wolves. I need to slow them down, change their focus, if I’m going to have any chance of getting out of this alive. I yank up my sleeve, run the box cutter through the small patch of scarred skin above my left wrist, and shake my arm as I run down the hall.

Blood spatters through the air, droplets landing on the floor behind me. It slows them down as they sense the life scattering around them. A good dozen of the spirits jump on the drops, desperately trying to lap up the blood I’m leaving for them. It won’t be enough, though.

I pocket the cutter, pull the Sharpie and some nametags from my pocket. I scribble on them as I run, slapping them on doorjambs, walls, the floor. One wall looks solid and isn’t and I almost take a tumble as my hand passes through it.
Draw, O coward. Live not on evil. Sex at noon taxes.
Nonsense palindromes, nothing complicated, but the ghosts jump on them like the good little obsessive-compulsives that they are, stopping to read them backwards and forwards and backwards again. If I had sunflower seeds I’d toss a handful behind for them to stop and count.

Soon I have enough breathing room that I can actually pay attention to what I’m looking for. The blood and palindromes won’t hold them long, so I have to work fast. Spells cast over here don’t last and I’m cut off from the pool of magic on the living side. So whatever is blocking me has to be actively generating the spell and it has to have enough of its own juice that it can last. Both of those are pretty easy to make.

Now I just need to find the goddamn thing. It could be as small as a ballpoint pen or a scrap of paper. But it should also be pumping out a lot of magic and in this dead place that should be pretty easy to spot. It’s harder here because everything gets sucked up by the environment, but I can still feel the magic tugging on the back of my mind the way I can feel it when somebody casts a spell nearby or draws power from the pool.

It takes me almost a minute to find it, mostly because half my attention is on the mass of ghosts all slurping at the drops of blood I left or hovering next to the palindromes in a boiling mass, flowing in and out of each other like water. It’s close, which it would have to be. I step slowly through the walls toward it, hoping I don’t attract too much attention.

Too late. A few ghosts break off to come snuffling for me like bloodhounds. I bolt, which gets some of the others’ attention. I need to find this thing fast. The tugging in the back of my head gets stronger in one direction, weaker in another. I’m playing a game of hot and cold with a swarm of ghosts on my heels.

And then I see it. A cell phone on the floor. I grab it, see runes on the back written in crayon, of all things. I wipe them away with my thumb and that pressure I’ve been feeling in the back of my mind cuts off as the spell breaks. That it was written in crayon is weird, but I don’t have time to think about it. The rest of the ghosts are almost on me.

I flip back to the land of the living. Color and sound all rush at me as the world solidifies. I find myself inside one of the storage units as the nearest ghost takes a swipe for me. The ghosts and I can still see each other, but now they can’t touch me. Frustrated, they swarm around and through me, claw at a meal they can’t get to anymore. I stick out my tongue and give them the finger.

The cellphone I brought back with me from the other side buzzes in my hand. I look at it, confused, then see a coffee can on the floor with a Bluetooth headset taped to it, wires sticking out and ending in a brick of white plasticine stuck to the top. Good bet that’s not coffee in there.

I’m in a locked storage unit with a bomb about to go off and surrounded by ghosts who want to eat me. Nicely done, Sergei, you clever sonofabitch. I didn’t just walk, I fucking ran into this trap.

This is gonna suck.

I turn toward the wall, break into a run. I’ve only got about five or six feet of space, but if I time it right I might survive. I run through the ghosts and then, just as I’m about to hit the wall, I flip over to the dead side.

And the bomb goes off. I transition before the shock wave hits. I watch the room disintegrate in silence around me. I run through the ghosts as they realize their meal’s back on the table. Hands and teeth rake through my skin, a hundred razor-sharp soldering irons. I keep moving, push past the pain, shove my way through the crowd until I’m a good four or five hallways past the unit that just blew up. Shift back before the ghosts can take anything else off of me.

Light and smoke and sound crash in on me and I collapse to the floor in the middle of a hallway. Fire alarms going off, water spraying from overhead sprinklers. My arms and back where the ghosts hit me feel like they’re on fire. My right hand is crossed with welts, each line glowing faintly like white fire under the skin. I try to make a fist, but even moving it is agony.

I drag myself from the floor. A wave of nausea hits me and I throw up. The ghosts are still swarming around me, harmless on this side. Probably more confused than ever. I swat at a few of them, my hand passing harmlessly through cold spots. They don’t care. They still think they’re getting a free meal.

On the other side it was hard to really get a sense of the current layout. Too many confusing walls from the past overlapping one another. But on this side there are signs and numbered doors. Even through the smoke I can tell where I am. From where I saw Sergei and his sister it’s clear they still don’t know where the Ebony Cage is. Vivian’s unit is on the other side of the building from where I saw them. Just around the corner from me.

I laugh, wiping my mouth with my sleeve. “They’re digging in the wrong place.” I lean against the wall, glad to feel something solid. That’s not the longest time I’ve spent on the other side, but it’s damn close and the first time I’ve been hit by that many ghosts. Everything hurts. The spots where they tagged me feel like they’re on fire. I’m feeling drained and weak. With the amount of magic I expended and that the other side drained from me I doubt I’ve got enough left to light a fart. But I’m going to have to move. The only advantage I might have is if Sergei thinks I’m dead. And if I tap the local pool to fill up, he’s going to know I’m not.

I don’t sense any new magic going off, but that doesn’t mean much. Gotta hand it to him, he’s smarter than I thought. Get me stuck on the other side, give me the way to get out, and the minute I use it, set a bomb off under my feet. Well played. I’m going to enjoy killing him.

With Kettleman’s skill Sergei could have set some more warning triggers and I might not know it, but I’m hoping he was expecting the bomb to take care of that for him. If he’s betting on the Ebony Cage to get him into Mictlan then he doesn’t need me anymore. I’m just a loose end that needs tying up.

Gunfire erupts in the distance, cutting through the sounds of the fire alarm. Hard to tell but I don’t think it’s inside the building. That won’t last. A second later my phone buzzes in my pocket and I almost have a heart attack thinking it’s Sergei’s detonator. I pull it out to see the number. Gabriela. Looks like she’s called me a couple times already. No coverage in the lands of the dead.

I answer the phone. “So glad I’m not trying to sneak up on the bad guy or anything,” I say.

“Then turn off your goddamn ringer. If you’re where I think you are you already blew your cover,” Gabriela says. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”

“One of these days, probably. And how’s your evening going?”

“Was that explosion you?” she says.

“Are those gunshots you?” I say back.

“You sound delirious,” she says. Pause for more gunfire. “You hurt?”

“Ghosts tried to eat me. Sergei tried to blow me up. I’ve been better.”

“What floor are you on?”

“Fourth. Come on up, we’ll have some laughs. Sergei and his sister are around here, somewhere. Maybe we can double date. Get milk shakes, hit the sock hop later.”

“Jesus, you are in bad shape. What the hell were you thinking?”

“Seemed like a good idea at the time?”

“You are such a pain in the ass,” she says.

“Part of my charm.”

“Sure, keep telling yourself that.”

The wall in front of me shimmers, glows blue. I’m too slow and before I can react Sergei, wearing his original-issue Russian mobster body, steps out of the wall with a big-ass Desert Eagle in his hand.

And he shoots me.