Voodoo Shanghai, page 10
I’ll pay whatever fine he deems fair for touching his property.
I slugged back the remnant of my drink. “He was an art piece.”
“Richan meant to scare you,” Lee said, passing me a second whisky sour across the bar. “He is a master manipulator. He catches ghosts, after all. He would have to be.”
“Well, he succeeded, with flying colours.” On the ride over, and as I’d walked through the underground, I’d replayed the delivery of the mirrors again and again in my head. Several times I’d almost turned back around to see what could be done for the undead art piece. To hell with Richan and Gideon.
But in reality, I’d just been happy to get away from the soothsayer.
“If he went that far out of his way to intimidate you, there was a reason. What did you do?”
“Oh, for Christ— Lee, for once, can you stop it with the victim blaming? I swear to god, all I did was walk through the door and hand him the mirrors.”
Lee tsked. “And in the process told him you are Gideon Lawrence’s new apprentice. I imagine Richan hoped to earn that position himself.”
I’d just taken a mouthful of whisky sour and did my best not to spit it over the bar, managing to keep it to a small dribble down my chin.
“Seriously, am I the last practitioner in Seattle to know anything?” I sputtered, wiping my face with my sleeve. Richan had known enough about Gideon to be gunning for my unwanted job? Oh, that did not bode well. Richan not liking me was one thing, but jealousy?
Lee sighed. “Richan is a long-standing member of the living paranormal community. A deplorable one for the methods he uses, but he is an expert on soothsayers and his art—both the paranormal and that which he sells,” she clarified. “Rarely do the corrupt and evil-minded maintain good standing amongst the living unless they become adept with the politics and familiar with the players. Richan did just that. He is also the kind of man who covets power. It only makes sense that he would campaign to become Gideon’s next apprentice, and, therefore, would want to determine for himself what qualities you possess that won out over his. I’m only surprised he didn’t believe his ghost, Miranda, when she told him you were the apprentice. Miranda is very good at divining these things.” Lee searched my face. “Tell me again what Miranda said to you.”
That was another part of my encounter that had left me unnerved.
“She implied someone is hunting me.” Or something. “And that I shouldn’t go to Portland, I think. That they’re waiting for me. I figured she meant Dane.”
“Hmmm. Perhaps. Though even Dane’s poltergeist should not be a threat to you. Or no more threat than you’ve dealt with recently.”
I shook my head, took another sip and held up my glass. “With friends like you, Lee—”
Lee made a face. “Even if Dane’s poltergeist is on a murderous rampage, you are an adept practitioner. He should be scared of you, not the other way around. No, I believe she meant someone else.”
“It could be she was warning me away from Katy’s ghost. She’s paralyzed,” I added, and quickly filled her in on the photographs, the ones Aaron had shown me of the murder scene and victim.
“Possibly,” Lee said, though she didn’t sound convinced. “Though that raises the question, why is she not a threat to anyone else?”
The bead curtain in front of Lee’s saloon door rustled as more customers walked in, and Lee began lining up shot glasses on the counter. She added a spoonful of formaldehyde-preserved brains to the bottom of each glass before topping them off with absinthe. The nice thing about being a bartender for the deceased is that the dead tend to order the same things.
“No, I don’t believe Miranda was warning you off the ghost, or even any one person. She speaks in riddles, not specifics. Remember, she may see the future, but the futures she sees are never set—only images, mirages, possibilities with their own mix of probabilities thrown in.”
“So I have nothing to worry about?” Except a jealous Richan, an angry Gideon, a fresh Dane-style killing in Portland…
Lee pursed her lips as she reached for a bottle on the top shelf labelled Whisky with black marker. “I believe Miranda was warning you to be on the lookout. Miranda is an oracle. She is a very good diviner and reader of the future. If she says there is something waiting for you in Portland, I would caution you to be very careful. Or better yet, do not go. That is another wise course of action. Possibly the wisest.” Her words hung in the air as she loaded the shot glasses on the tray and headed for the zombies’ table.
I got the hint: that I rarely took the wise course of action as far as she was concerned.
I took another sip of my second whisky sour, and was mulling over Miranda’s words when I felt a chill in the air.
“You’re slipping, K,” Nate said, appearing on the bar stool beside me. “Rumour has it you managed to piss off Richan in less than five words. Awesome. You know that conversation we had about you saving our collective skins?”
I shrugged. “I couldn’t have pissed him off that much. You’re not bound yet.”
Nate narrowed his eyes at me. “You’re a real asshole, you know that, K?”
I raised my glass to that. With Lee absent, he started to rummage behind the bar until he found a beer glass—which he began to fill.
Lee’s problem.
Fresh glass of beer in hand, Nate glowered at the bar. Now that was odd. Nate usually perked up when he had beer. Come to think of it, it was also odd for Nate to be back this side already after a night out. “How was last night? You finally meet Edie Sedgwick?”
Nate sighed, looked up and gave me a sideways glance. “Okay, but you need to promise to be gentle with me.”
I thought about it. “You know as well as I do it really depends on what you did.”
He looked back down at the bar. “Here we were, having a couple drinks, talking music—she was totally into me. Then all of a sudden she gets up and says she has to go to the washroom, she’ll be right back…” Nate looked over his shoulder, as if she might appear.
I stared at him. “Nate, she’s a ghost, not a zombie, right? So she doesn’t actually need to ever—”
“Habits are hard to break!?”
I glanced at Lee, who had returned to the bar. She took a look at Nate and shook her head.
“Nate, Edie is long gone, isn’t she?” I said.
Nate sat up, slapping the bar with his hands, even managing to make a sound. “She ghosted me, all right?”
I raised my eyebrows at him. Ghosted had a number of connotations in this instance.
“Did she touch you somewhere she wasn’t supposed to? It’s okay, Nate, you can point to the spot on one of the zombies if it will make it easier.”
He snorted at me. “Har de har har.”
Nate might just have the worst taste in women—living or dead. I sipped on my whisky sour while he sulked. “She stuck you with the bar tab, didn’t she?”
Nate shook his head. “I don’t know what happened. Seriously, K, we were having an awesome time—ask Lee.”
I glanced at Lee, but she was wisely staying the hell out of it.
“Then this zombie with really wild white hair wanders in and heads out the back, and the next thing I know, she’s got to go to the bathroom and never comes back. I don’t get it. What’d I do?”
I put my head between my hands. Jesus…“Nate, that was zombie Andy Warhol—she stood you up for Warhol.” Might even have a racket going—the free bar-tab tour.
Nate’s frown deepened. “The soup can artist? Do they know each other or something?”
“I—” I stopped. I was not getting into this with him right now. Remember, Kincaid, Nate was around before Wikipedia and Google. When you could still reasonably not know the obvious…“Google it, Nate.” I returned his sideways glance. “You mean to tell me you’ve been here all night and all day?”
He gave me a sheepish shrug. “I mean, she said she was coming back, and then, you know, I was hoping…”
“You lost track of time, didn’t you?”
Nate stared back down at the bar, looking more than a little embarrassed.
I decided to let him off easy. Nate had a blind spot left over from life. It was only a few weeks ago now that we’d found out Mindy, Nate’s girlfriend while he was alive, had been the one to help orchestrate his death.
The fact that Nate had made an effort to meet someone else, after two decades of pining after Mindy Pine…
I took a sip of my drink—a small one. This was my second and I still had to ride to the library tonight. “You have a bar tab and I have a job for us, what do you say?”
Nate shook his head. “I don’t know. Halloween kinda took it out of me. I mean, I know times have changed, but the campus concert where they had me dress up in fairy wings and all those kids had the rainbow horns on their heads—I mean, what was I supposed to be? A lumberjack fairy? Wouldn’t that be the opposite of a fairy? Lumberjacks cut down trees.”
“Unicorns, Nate. They were dressed as rainbow unicorns. And it’s not another college concert. It’s a murder case in Portland.” I quickly filled him in on the new murder scene and the paralyzed Katy Price. “I just want you on call in case I need you to try and talk to her. It’s a strange one, Nate. Ghosts don’t normally stay still like that. I could use a ghost’s perspective—and let’s face it, you have an eye for things gone wrong with Otherside.” It was true. Nate had an uncanny knack for spotting inconsistencies in Otherside, something not all the dead or practitioners have.
“You’ll cover my newest outstanding bar tab with Lee?” Nate asked with a sigh. “Seriously, K, I had it paid off for—what? A month?”
Nate feeling bad about a bar tab…I gave him a surreptitious glance. “Who are you and what did you do with Nate?”
He sighed and gave me a crooked smile, a sadder one than I was used to. “I know, I know—ghosts don’t change. That doesn’t stop us all from trying occasionally, does it?”
My heart went out to him. Nate had been a reckless man-child obsessed with his music and living life to his version of the fullest. But that didn’t mean he was shallow. Nate was aware of his faults, just as he had been while he was alive, and he wasn’t blind to the consequences of his actions.
“This isn’t me fronting your bar tab, Nate. It’s work.”
“Tomorrow?” he said, staring back at the bar, still melancholy.
I nodded. “Bright and early. Be listening in and ready to cross over and be my eyes and ears—invisible like.”
He nodded. “I won’t let you down, K.” To Lee he said, “I’m out of here, Lee. K’s”—he gestured at me—“you know.”
Lee barely gave him a glance, looking to me instead for my nod. She knew I was good for it.
I waited until Nate vanished, and even checked to make sure he’d dispersed back to the Otherside, before waving Lee over again. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Nate; he was easily one of the most loyal friends I’d ever had. He’d stuck by me during the past four months when I’d hit rock bottom. When Aaron hadn’t.
But there were some things Nate really didn’t need to know I was looking into. Especially since our conversation last night about not pushing Gideon.
“Any headway on what I asked you to look into?” I said, quietly, casually.
Lee glanced around the bar, but most of the patrons were well out of earshot. She leaned across, a wary look on her face. “I have. But I do not know if this is the path you wish to pursue.”
“I’m not looking for a way out, Lee—I have no intention of breaking my bargains—not anymore. What I need is information.”
Part of my new deal with Gideon, the one that made me his apprentice and assistant, was that I couldn’t try to get out of the arrangement or do anything that might betray him.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t arm myself with knowledge. Which was what I’d asked Lee to provide.
“I’m not pulling a fast one, I promise. I just need to know more about sorcerers and Gideon’s history. Lee, I barely know what I’ve gotten myself into. You said yourself I walked into this deal blindfolded.”
Lee snorted, her green eyes narrowing. “I fail to see how your ignorance is my responsibility. Helping you arm yourself against Lawrence is not the act of a friend.”
I made a face. Yeah, I’d thought she might have an issue with that part. “Try not to think of it as arming me. Think of it as helping me protect myself. From the unknown.”
Her face hardened. “There is a fine line between survival and offence—take care to remember that, Kincaid.” But she didn’t walk away. “I made the inquiries on your behalf amongst my contacts. I didn’t use your name, I simply said that Gideon had moved in and I wished to know as much as possible about the sorcerer.”
“Lee—” Shit, I hadn’t expected Lee to ask around so openly. The last thing I wanted was Gideon finding out and coming after her…
“Don’t worry. The sources I used are very discreet. One, a historian, in fact, who specializes in the occult and less-known histories of the dead, turned up something promising. He knew of the sorcerer.”
“Lee, can I stress how not good that is—”
She hushed me. “I said he knows of Gideon, but not for the reasons you think. He collects books—not spell books or anything that would attract Gideon or his ilk, but history books and diaries.”
I sat back, mollified. If Lee said she knew what she was doing—well—she’d been the uncontested zombie queen of Underground Seattle for a century. Who was I to question her methods?
“What did they tell you?”
“Well, for starters, you mentioned Gideon was burned for witchcraft?”
I nodded. I’d found accounts in the university library—a reference to Gideon being tried for supernatural crimes. I’d also found out how long he’d been a ghost: a thousand years. I’d meant to go back to the text, had had the best intentions of retrieving it, but I hadn’t done so, lest Gideon discover it. My relationship with the ghost was prickly enough as it was. Even if I wasn’t trying to break our deal.
So I’d gone a different route. I’d turned to Lee.
“He gave me the impression the record of the event was muddled. That there was a woman involved and possibly a child that had precipitated a falling-out with his king or warlord, or whoever it was he served.”
“What kind of falling-out?”
Lee shrugged. “Well, if a woman and child were involved, I suspect it was the sort of falling-out that’s occurred all over the world throughout human history—one woman, two men.”
“Gideon doesn’t strike me as the kind of person to get in a bind over a woman.”
“You’d be surprised what some men do for the attentions of a woman. Either way, my friend was under the impression that the falling-out had more to do with the child than the woman,” Lee said, then disappeared into her office.
“Lee!” Leave it to her to wander off mid-conversation.
She returned a moment later, gliding gracefully towards me, her dress just barely brushing against the wood floors.
“Since you will be in Portland, there is a friend I would like you to call on—professionally speaking. In the Portland underground.”
The Portland city of the dead—a sister to Seattle’s underground. There were four underground cities of the dead along the west coast: Vancouver, Seattle, Portland and San Francisco. Seattle was arguably the largest and most important of the four. Though they all had access to the harbours and San Francisco had its fogs to cover the movements of the dead, Seattle still had the most robust underground trade economy and ease of travel. Forgotten railways, old tunnels, thick forests, a sea dotted with remote islands, and a dark sky at 3:30 p.m. in the dead of winter allowed even the more obvious dead to evade the eyes of the living. But Portland had its own charms. It was remote, and the locals seemed much less aware of the bustling city beneath their feet.
The four cities also had their own characters, personalities and varied populations. Portland was filled with frontier zombies and ghosts, and they had a reputation for shooting the living first, checking to see if you were a trespasser later. You did not want to find yourself alone in an underground Portland alleyway, especially not one with a zombie.
Even with my reputation as a practitioner and Lee as my contact, I’d hesitate to enter the Portland underground. The dead are protective of their secrets…
“Lee,” I said carefully. “I don’t know if I’m going to have time for the Portland underground. I have no idea how long I’ll be staying—or how busy Aaron or the FBI will have me on site.”
“My historian acquaintance resides in San Francisco and I asked him to send the journal that mentions Gideon to my friend in the Portland underground. It arrived this afternoon.”
She pulled a white card from her pocket and passed it to me. It had been decorated on one side with Lee’s red calligraphy-like handwriting: Honoured representative of Lee Ling Xhao. On the back was written a name in blue pen: Celeste Bergenn.
“I’ve told her to hold the journal for you.” She lifted her eyebrows. “For a small favour.”
Of course there was a favour. “I notice you’re conveniently distancing yourself from the journal and me in case Gideon gets wind.”
“And using the favour you now owe me for procuring the book to pay back one of my own. You are welcome,” Lee said, with a perfectly straight face.
I was reminded once again why Lee was the undisputed queen of the zombies. I gazed at the card. The name didn’t ring a bell, but I’d never made myself familiar with the Portland zombies. “What does she need?”
“A good practitioner, for starters. She needs some—help,” Lee said after a moment. “I would go myself or send Mork, but since you will be there…”
