Broken Souls (7 page)

Important safety tip: don’t try this in an airplane.

The air around me has gone cold and stale, sucking at my lungs, pulling at my energy. This is a world of accelerated entropy. Everything drains fast over here, magic, life, willpower. It’s no wonder the ghosts want to consume the living. There’s nothing here but emptiness and anguish. Sounds are dull and muted, color nothing but grays and blues.

Though the Bruja’s in the land of the living and I’m over here on the dead side, I can feel her passing through me, an icy chill as we step through each other’s bodies. To me she’s a vaguely human shaped glow, but unless she can see over onto this side, to her I’ve completely disappeared.

I turn, watch her glowing form stumble as she tries to stop before slamming into the wall. I reach around her with one arm, ready the straight razor with the other. I can’t touch her from here. She’s as insubstantial to me on this side as a ghost is to me on the other. But that’s fine. I’m not planning on staying here.

I pull myself back into the land of the living, sound and color a synesthetic explosion, the Bruja snapping into solidity in front of me. I wrap her in a headlock with my free arm, swing the straight razor at her neck.

And stop just as it dimples her throat. She freezes.

“I can kill you right now,” I say. My voice is a ragged wheeze, every breath is like sucking on fire. “But I’m not going to. Because I’m not the guy you think I am and I don’t have the knife you think I do. Believe it or not, we’re on the same side. I’m betting he tried to kill you because he tried to kill me, too. Now can I put this away and not have you beat the crap out of me? Please?”

She doesn’t say anything for a while and I’m beginning to worry that she’s prepping some nasty spell in her head. I really don’t want to have to kill her. But better her than me. I’m all set to swipe the blade across her throat when she finally says, “Okay.”

“Really? No trying to take my head off?”

“You’re the one with the razor,” she says. I think about that for a second.

“Good point. Let’s start over.” This is such a bad idea, but if it goes to shit I’m really not any worse off than I was a minute ago. I count to three in my head, let her go. We both push away from each other like jumping away from rattlesnakes.

“Truce?” I say. She turns, anger and exhaustion in her eyes. I fold the razor, slip it back into my coat pocket. Spread my arms wide open. I worry that I’ve made a really big mistake.

“Truce,” she says. Her voice is a lisp from a fat lip, a black and purple bruise spreading across her cheek. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

“Thank you.” I slump against the wall, slide down to the floor. At this point if she’s going to kill me I just might let her.

She slumps to the floor next to me. “Sorry about that,” she says. “But I can’t afford to fuck around.”

I wave it away. “Don’t worry about it. I’d have done the same thing.”

“Yeah?”

I think about it a second. If I thought the Russian guy was coming for me dressed as somebody else? “Probably just shot you, actually.”

“I should try that next time. You want a drink?”

“God, yes.”

“Something I can call you besides Bruja?” I say.

“Gabriela,” she says, sliding a couple Advil across the desk at me. “Gabriela Cortez. Take these. Look like you could use them.” She pulls a half-empty bottle of Sauza out of a desk drawer and a couple of plastic tumblers. Pours a shot into each.

We’ve taken the parley to a room converted into an office at the end of the hall. Floral wallpaper peeling in long strips, stink of old cigarettes ground into patchy carpet. Window looking down onto a Skid Row alley, big map of Los Angeles with pins stuck all over it on one wall. She sits in a creaking, wooden desk chair leaning over an oak desk. Digs scattered pills of Advil out of a first aid kit. Cold pack pressed against her cheek that she got out of a minifridge in the corner. The fridge has a little freezer in the top half. In the bottom are row upon row of medical blood bags.

“Thanks.” I toss back the pills with the shot. Advil and tequila. Asskicker’s communion. “Lot of blood you got in that fridge.”

“Got a lot more in the basement. Darius tell you what I do here?”

“Something about bettering the lives of L.A.’s hidden homeless?” A lot of supernaturals, vampires, shapechangers, shit like that, they don’t do so well in the real world, even the ones who look human, or used to be human.

There’s never been a lot of them, and they’ve always gotten a bad rap. Some of it deserved, sure. Nobody’s going to say a Wendigo isn’t fucking dangerous. But like bears that wander into somebody’s backyard, they’re usually more freaked out about you than you are about them. So they hide. As well as they can, at least.

She laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “One way to put it, I suppose.” She points to the map on the wall. “That’s the concentration of homeless in L.A. Green pins are human. Red ones means there’s at least a couple non-human in the mix.”

“Lot of red here.”

“That’s because of me. Five years ago they were all over the place. I bought the hotel. Got the word out. Have about a dozen living here now. Mostly vamps. A couple other things. A few come in just when they want a shower. Lot more out there. They still don’t trust me. I give ’em a home. Keep them off the streets.”

“Where they can’t hurt anybody?”

She shrugs. “That’s a little racist, isn’t it? Sure, but that’s not why I do it. Vampires are victims. Addicts. Not just blood, but other stuff. And they hardly ever kill anymore.”

“Fair enough.” I could tell her a few stories about a group I met in South Dakota a few years ago, but keep it to myself. Out in the country they don’t have the kinds of checks on their behavior that you have in a big city. Never really been sure why, though. It can’t all be fear of being found out by normals.

She throws back her shot, doesn’t even wince. Even with that puffed-out bruise on her cheek, she’s girl-next-door pretty. But the way she slams back her tequila and handed my ass to me out in the hallway, it’s clear she’s a hell of a lot more than that.

“So why do you do it?” I say.

“I doubt you’d understand.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You have to ask? Half the mages I run into try to kill me. The rest want a piece of what I’ve built. Seem to think I’m building an army or something. All they see is power.”

“This is your family,” I say. “Isn’t it? Your community.”

“Huh. Maybe you do get it.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” I say. “It’s not something I’d choose.”

“It’s not for everybody, that’s for sure. This is a duty. Nobody else is going to speak for these people. Why not me?”

I think back to a cab driver I killed a few months ago. He’d been murdering young men and women living on the street. Hustlers and prostitutes, mostly. Defenseless people who could barely take care of themselves. I found him when I ran into a ghost of one of his victims in the back of his cab. I bled him on a road in the Santa Monica mountains and fed him to a crowd of hungry ghosts.

“Now that’s something I can understand.” I sip my tequila. It burns in my throat. “I have some guesses as to why you thought I was the Russian guy,” I say, changing the subject. “But I’d rather just hear it from you.” I stretch my back and pain flares through my left arm.

“What do you know about the knife?” she says.

“Mostly that two people have tried to kill me with it. Or that there’s two knives, I’m not sure. They both tell me they’re going to wear my skin like a suit. Seen one of them do it with somebody else’s. That’s it.”

“It’s one knife. Best guess is it’s a few thousand years old, at least. Legend’s kind of fuzzy. Might belong to a god named Xipe Totec, an Aztec farming god who wore the flayed skins of his sacrifices. Maybe somebody else. But it’s Aztec.”

“A farming god? Who wears dead men’s skins?”

“I know, right? The new skin is a metaphor for new growth, crops in fallow ground, that kind of thing.”

“The Aztecs were a fucked up people,” I say. And this is the pantheon I’ve married into. I wonder if he’s an in-law. Fantastic.

“All the Meso-American gods are pretty much soaking in blood. Hell, it could belong to half a dozen others or none at all, and just had that legend tacked onto it later. No idea.”

She sips at her tequila, shifts the ice pack on her bruise a little. “The short of it is that if you skin somebody with it you can take their form, their memories, everything but their actual soul into yourself and call it up whenever you need it.”

“Everything but the soul?”

“Yeah. Why, what are you thinking?”

“I ran into the ghost of a guy who was on the receiving end of that knife. It was, I dunno, fragmented. All broken up.”

She thinks about it. “Yeah,” she says. “Ghosts aren’t just souls. They’re accumulated experience, thoughts, memories. If he were stripped of everything but his soul that might do it.”

I’m surprised and it must show on my face because she laughs. “You’re not the only one who knows how to deal with dead people. Neat trick with popping over to the other side, by the way. That is what you did, right? Out in the hall? I wasn’t expecting that.”

“Yeah. You been there?” The thing with necromancy, or any other knack, is that any mage can learn how to do it. We’re all just better at some things than others. I got dead things in spades, but I can’t, for example, read auras for shit.

Most mages don’t like dealing with the dead except to ask the occasional question or do an exorcism because some Haunt’s managed to go poltergeist. And even fewer want to head over to a reality they’ll probably see soon enough. So it’s a pretty small group.

“Couple times. Kinda fucks me up, though.”

“Stay there too long and it’ll fuck anybody up. Back to my original question. What about the Russian?”

“I don’t know who he is. I think he might have worked for a guy named Ben Griffin who was running rackets around the mage set. I heard somebody took him out a few months ago.”

“Awesome. Can’t win for losing.”

“Sorry?”

“I’m the one who killed him. Sort of.”

“So you’re the one I get to thank for the power vacuum.”

“Brought the cockroaches out?”

“And then some. It’s had its ups and downs. Nobody’s been able to pull everyone together, but there are a lot of people trying. I think this guy’s one of them.”

“So you think this is a power grab? He was looking for some heavy artillery?”

She shakes her head. “I thought that at first, but it doesn’t scan. How’d he even know about the knife? I had it in a warehouse down in Compton and—”

“Whoa, wait.
You
had the knife?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Been in my family a few hundred years. What, you don’t think I picked Bruja as a name just because it sounded good, did you? My mother came up from Mexico and tried to get out of the family business. Didn’t work out so well. So when I came along and showed signs of magic she carted me down to my grandmother to learn the trade. When I came back I had crates full of random shit we’ve been guarding for generations. The knife was just part of it.”

She pours me another shot of tequila. “But like I was saying, I had the knife in a warehouse in Compton. He broke in with a half-dozen guys last week, killed some of my people. I was lucky I was down there, or he would have killed a lot more. As it is I managed to get his crew, but I missed him.”

“So when you heard I was asking around about an obsidian knife and wanted to see you,” I say, “you figured he’d skinned me and was trying to sneak in to finish you off?”

“Something like that, yeah. I don’t know who the hell I can trust, anymore. If he can take anybody’s body, all of their knowledge, how do I even know any of my people are even who they say they are? I tried vetting you when I got your name. Checked with Darius and he told me everything he knew about you. Including your deal with Santa Muerte. She as stone cold a bitch as I’ve heard?”

“Worse, probably. Darius tell you about my sister?”

“Some, yeah.”

“She murdered her to get me back here. Twisted things around so I’d end up tied to her.” I show her the ring on my finger.

“Why’d you do it?”

I’ve been asking myself that question for weeks now. Trying to find some angle where I could have said no. “I was thinking I didn’t have any choices left. Did Darius vouch for me?”

“Sort of. But you know him. He’s all fucking cryptic and shit. ‘If he’s him you can trust him, but if he ain’t you best give him a wide berth.’ Is he really a Djinn?”

“Near as I can tell. Looks like he came to California with the Spanish. And then his bottle disappeared and nobody’s found it, yet. It’s around here, somewhere.”

“What happens if somebody gets hold of it?” She looks thoughtful, and I can’t tell if she’s thinking of looking for his bottle herself, or if she’s reexamining her relationship with Darius. Probably both.

“Don’t know,” I say. “Nothing good, probably.”

“You said you’ve run into two people,” she says. “With the knife.”

“Yeah. The guy and some woman. Figure she’s Russian, too. Sounds it, at least. With him I thought I might have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was meeting somebody who might have been able to help me get out of this situation with Santa Muerte. But then I caught her tailing me. Things got hairy on the Metro over on Wilshire and—”

“Shit, the train? That was you? It’s been on the news all day.”

“It was her. Let me be clear on that. Somebody gave her a really nasty spell that took everybody out on that car when they got between us. She’s out of her fucking mind.”

“Christ. I don’t like this,” she says. “It was bad enough when I thought it was just a pissy little power grab, but if they’re targeting you . . . Oh, this is not good.”

“How do you think I feel? I almost ended up this jackhole’s skin suit.”

“I think this might still be a power grab, but I don’t think it’s that simple. Aztec blade, Santa Muerte. You.”

“That hadn’t even occurred to me.” Could this guy be trying to get to Santa Muerte through me? Hell, if that were the case all he’d have to do is ask. I’d be happy to put her head on a stick for him if I knew how.

I start to say that but before anything comes out of my mouth there’s a presence next to me, a feeling like I’m being watched, which is more than I’ve been getting so far when he shows up. I turn my head and there’s Alex leaning against the map on the wall with all its pushpins and multicolored circles.

“You need to get out of here,” he says.

Gabriela sees me staring at the wall. “What is it?”

“You might not believe me, but there’s a dead friend of mine standing over there telling us we have to leave.”

She looks to the wall, looks to me. Even with other mages I usually get the “He’s off his Thorazine” look, but she takes it all in stride. “Okay. Ghost? I’ve got this place pretty heavily warded against—”

“He’s not a ghost. I don’t know what he is, but it’s not that.”

“You called me your friend,” Alex says. “I’m touched. That’s better than hallucination. But seriously, there’s a small army heading here. If you don’t get out now, you’re not going to get out at all.”

“How many?”

“Twenty? Thirty? I dunno. Just a lot, okay? You need to move.”

I tell Gabriela this and before I can finish the sentence she reaches under the desk and hits a button. Old alarm bells go off throughout the building, tinny klaxons that sound like grade school fire alarms. She grabs the phone on her desk.

“Trouble. Get people ready.” She pauses, listening to the person on the other end of the line. “Unless they can blow open the back door, no, they’ll be coming through the front.”

I stand up, pain shooting through my side where she threw me into the door. Between that and jumping out of the train I don’t even want to think about what the bruises are going to look like tomorrow. I need more information. I go to ask Alex what they’re armed with, what their plan is. But he’s gone. “Dammit.”

“That doesn’t sound good.” Gabriela says. “More trouble from your friend?”

“Hope not. He’s gone.”

“He do that a lot?”

“Seems to, yeah.”

She reaches behind a filing cabinet and pulls out a machete with a blade more than two feet long. Looks like you could guillotine a fucking elephant with it. Which, I guess, is kind of the point.