Dizzy nodded wordlessly, somehow embarrassed. She’d been without the woman who raised her for some time and thought she’d forgotten the ability to feel shame.

  A light drizzle began to fall in the courtyard and the curious onlookers began to disappear behind their doors.

  “I’ll walk you out.” Maia got to her feet by leaning on her staff, waving off her helpers. Dizzy walked alongside her through the corridor and back to the front door. By then the drizzle had become a steady downpour. “If you can fix this, if you can give Manny this justice, my family will be grateful.” Maia opened the door for her. “And you will find you do not need the silver in your pocket.”

  Dizzy felt for the brass knuckles in her jacket pocket and smirked. “Can’t be too careful.”

  “Lives short as yours, I agree.” Maia smiled.

  Dizzy stepped out into the rain. Porch lights turned on along her path to her car. A friendly gesture in the dark.

  An investor had made a dream come true for Nadege. Had they also financed Lonnie’s movie? What was Kit Walker’s thing? Restaurateur? And what did it have to do with Tommy? A moneyed security client maybe? If that raggedy bitch knew somethi⁠—

  “Excuse me,” called a chipper male voice as she unlocked her door. Dizzy startled. Back on the sidewalk, a short, sunburnt sort of bearded man dressed in white stood beneath a white umbrella.

  “Yeah?” Dizzy called back.

  “Forgive me, you just look so familiar,” he said with a smile.

  Dizzy shrugged. “One of those faces, I guess.”

  “Ah!” He yelped breathlessly. “You’re the deadwalker!”

  Dizzy frowned, confused and mounting suspicion. “Not thee deadwalker, there’s more of⁠—”

  “No, you’re the one,” he interrupted. “Curious, though. There’s no dead here. What brings you to this neighborhood?”

  “Can I help you, stranger?” Dizzy made a show of the gun on her hip and her eyes swept the sidewalks and rooftops but there was nothing.

  “Is that what you do? Help people?” He approached her at a saunter, wingtips clicking the sidewalk. “Do you find that when it matters most, you are…too late?”

  “You ask a lot of fucking questions.” She ripped the gun from its holster and raised it just as Maia’s door opened and three of her family members emerged onto the stoop.

  The man in white stopped, glancing over his shoulder at the apparent warning. “No matter,” he smiled again. “I was just on my way elsewhere. Good to see you, Desdemona Carter, so up close. I’ll give your regards to hell, shall I? Very popular among the demons. And you’ll give my regards to Lonnie—” here he chuckled, “—whenever next you see her.”

  Dizzy pulled the trigger before a single question could properly form but the bullet stuck in the air between them and dropped to the gutter an inch before it could reach his nose. She walked closer, intent on unloading the clip, maybe just strangling him if she had to, but the Dracs grabbed her with surprising strength and disarmed her with even more surprising speed. She roared and fought against them until Maia reappeared in the doorway.

  The man in white pointed at her and mouthed along, tauntingly as she looked pointedly at Dizzy and declared, “Not my house.”

  “Who are you?” Dizzy asked him. “Who the fuck are you and where is Lonnie?”

  He put up his hands blamelessly to Maia and then proceeded to walk back up the sidewalk.

  “Who are you! Who is he?” Dizzy turned to Maia and the men holding her. Before long she was allowed to jerk herself from their grasp, but the moment she took her eyes from his back, he was gone.

  “Why did you stop me!” Dizzy shrieked as they gave her back her gun. “That was him! That was our answer!”

  “Not him,” Maia said sternly. “There are children here. Not. My. House.”

  “Not him,” Dizzy repeated, incredulous. “What do you mean not him? Do you know who he is?”

  Maia looked around to the others as if asking them the same question. Each shook their head.

  Maia sighed. “No, we do not know him. But he did not bring a gun to my door. Go home. I am too old for regrets and would hate to take back my offer of friendship.”

  The three Dracs stood aside and allowed Dizzy back to her car. They waited in the street as she pulled off, screaming curses as she found her way back to the city lights. There was no man in white among the souls on the sidewalks.

  five

  Back in her dining room, Dizzy pored over every picture of every victim, looking for other traces of the symbol, any sign of the man in white and found nothing. But Kit had just opened a restaurant, and Will Hadley had just conducted his first symphony not five days befo⁠—

  Her office (living room) doorbell buzzed. Indeed a brown silhouette hovered on just the other side of her frosted glass door. Dizzy glanced out the window. Barely daylight.

  Too early for a client, she thought. One of the tenants must have locked themselves out again.

  When she opened the door, however, she cursed silently.

  “So you’re alive,” Carmen said with a raise of a perfectly arched eyebrow. She stood with her hands in the pockets of a black bomber jacket worn over a black t-shirt and black jeans and impossibly high black stilettos. Rain steamed off her so quickly she barely looked like she’d been wet in the first place.

  Dizzy stood back to let her inside.

  “I thought I might stumble on a body I’d have to drag out of here.”

  “Those your body-dragging shoes?” Dizzy asked.

  “I can do anything in these shoes,” Carmen said plainly.

  Dizzy didn’t doubt it. She led her into the kitchen where she poured them each a finger of bourbon like it wasn’t six a.m.

  “So what’s going on?” Dizzy asked, sliding a glass along the counter. She leaned against the windowsill next to the fire escape and wondered if she might need to use it.

  “I could ask you the same thing. You haven’t been returning my calls.”

  “Yeah, I went to the desert on Saturday.”

  “That case took a lot out of you?”

  “Something like that.”

  Carmen nodded slowly. “So it has nothing to do with you avoiding me?” She stared Dizzy down as she sipped from her glass.

  Damn it.

  “No…” Dizzy started, a heartbeat too late.

  Carmen grinned and pointed a lacquered fingernail at her. “I knew it!”

  “Carmen…”

  “What is it? I’m meddling? Trying to tell you how to do your job? You think I’m coming for Lonnie’s spot?”

  “Look.” Dizzy sighed. “I know we understand each other. Or we understood each other. But I’m not ready to complicate it. And maybe by now I should be. I don’t know what Lonnie would do in my position. I can’t just leave her lost because I can’t guarantee that’s how she would handle it. So if it’s a problem...”

  “Oh calm down.” Carmen laughed and Dizzy thought the room seemed brighter for it. “It’s already complicated. You think I want in on that whole possessive girlfriend mortal coil thing and I don’t. I know you’re going to do what you have to do. But I do care about you. Your life is short and I don’t want you to spend the rest of it like this.”

  Dizzy didn’t respond immediately, just nodded into her glass and shifted her weight, wondering about the proper etiquette of this situation. Carmen was first to fill the silence.

  “Tommy came by Saturday night. He was pretty pissed off. Said Ash picked something out of his pocket.”

  Dizzy bristled. Tommy didn’t have a problem hitting women. “She gave me a card she found on him. I have it.” She led Carmen back to the bedroom where she dug the black card out of last night’s jeans.

  “Ash alright?” she asked.

  “You know we handle ourselves.” Carmen ran a thumb over the symbol and handed it back. “Hagenti.”

  “What?”

  “It’s an insignia for the Legions of Hagenti. Not the worst of the global gangs, I’d say, but that depends on which legion you run into.”

  “Nico said the demon would be a problem.”

  “Well who’s commanded a legion of anything and not been a problem? I’ll be the first to say things are weird here lately. There’s…a balance shifting. Hell’s taking more of an interest in the city than they used to. I think Gen got here first, got ahead of whatever’s coming, but he won’t be the last.”

  “Gen?” Dizzy raised an eyebrow.

  “Don’t be jealous; it’s beneath you. Honestly he’s very clever and a little eccentric. Fancies himself an art connoisseur and traffics in that and gold on the black market. Thinks it’s highbrow human stuff,” Carmen explained sardonically.

  Dizzy bit her lip. Carmen was already watching her expectantly. May as well out with it.

  “Come here.” Dizzy led her back to the dining room and spread papers out across the table in an order that likely only made sense to her. “Lonnie had some mail with that symbol on it. I saw it the night I found her and I guess just…forgot until I saw the same piece of mail in the hand of victim number four.” She pointed to the picture of Nadege and Emmanuelle. “This kid’s a Drac. I went to talk to them last night…”

  Carmen blinked rapidly.

  “I know, I know. But look. Emmanuelle tells me this is from an investor or philanthropist or some shit. Nadege had just opened a gallery. Lonnie had just landed a movie. These people…all of them in some kind of creative field and on the verge of something. The Fallen Angels Killer was making dreams come true and then murdering the dreamers at the height of their happiness.”

  “That’s…fucked up,” Carmen replied.

  “Where I’m stuck is cross-referencing all the investors I can find on their projects. There’s a little overlap but almost everything’s got a board of at least twelve people or…”

  “Or they’re angel investors.” Carmen slid the card onto the table and tapped at the symbol. It did look like an angel. “Unnamed. Not findable.”

  “Shit.” Dizzy ran a hand over her face.

  Morning had come, though it was hard to tell with the storm. There was no sunlight peeking through blinds to paint things morning colors. But in the silence between them in her dining room, Dizzy recognized the roar of a garbage truck and the uptick in swishing noises as traffic picked up outside her window. She could tell Carmen was trying to decide if more information would help get her killed.

  “Look, Gen is…old. I haven’t seen him in at least a few centuries. He’s unlikely to look the same, but he’s almost certainly in a human form. One of the victims had to have talked to him, found nothing to raise an alarm. When you look for him, just know he’s sober so you won’t find him in the usual places. Might find the legion though. And he rolls around with this guy the Magician. Without him, Gen can’t hold his human form.”

  “What’s his other form?”

  “A bull,” Carmen said and finished her drink. “But with wings and a fucked up temper.”

  “Of course there’s wings.”

  Carmen tapped her nose.

  “This Magician…wear a lot of white?”

  “Well it varies.” Carmen shrugged. “They’re mortal, so there’ve been many of them over time. Encounter with a very specific kind of weirdo?”

  Dizzy couldn’t bring herself to explain what had happened with the man in white without throwing up. She changed the subject. “You know where I can find Tommy? See if he’ll tell me where to find the Magician?”

  “Tommy…will not be back to the Sun anytime soon.” Carmen sighed and sauntered over. “We couldn’t kill him as long as he’s got that mark but his little temper tantrum got him banned.”

  Dizzy nodded. It was of no consequence. She knew how she’d find him.

  Carmen palmed the sides of her face with hot hands and kissed her. “You could be happy. You know that, right?”

  Dizzy got to forget herself in the pools of Carmen’s ancient eyes and felt what it would be like to breathe without the weight of Lonnie’s life on her soul for fleeting moments before she pulled away. “Not yet.”

  “Famous last words of a lot of dying men.” Carmen winked. “Do what you’ve got to do, but come see me soon. I don’t want to have to come back here. Uninvited, anyway.”

  Dizzy agreed as she always did and walked her back to the front door. She waited at her bedroom window until Carmen got into her car parked on the street below before making herself another drink.

  She unlocked the record cabinet with a key she kept on her altar. Three dolls, each on their own shelves, lay idle and unmoving beneath glass bell jars. They were more head than body, carved from the wood of elephant trees with black pits burned into their faces for over-large eyes and crude nicks in their torsos—I, II, III—to distinguish one from the other.

  “Wakey wakey, boys,” she whispered. Wisps of incense smoke that had created a haze in the room were drawn into the doll bodies to mimic breath until they twitched and began to stand. Their faces were too simple to be expressive, but each slumped their little shoulders or threw their arms into the air or banged their heads against the cabinet walls in frustration at having to see her again. Dizzy wouldn’t let them go until she got what she wanted.

  She held up the black card.

  “This symbol mean anything to any of you?”

  The dolls leaned forward to inspect the card, exchanged glances, and then shook their heads at her.

  Humph.

  “What about the name Hagenti?”

  III reached up to try and pull the cabinet door shut over them again but Dizzy slammed it back open and flicked the doll between the eyes.

  “I thought so,” she said. “You know where he is?”

  II put his head in his hands while I gesticulated wildly. Dizzy imagined profanity-laden protests in that Old Tejas accent he had back when he was a man who could speak.

  “Doesn’t matter.” Dizzy waved her hand. “You’re going to find Tomas Pascal for me.”

  II drew his arm across his throat.

  “Find, not kill. I have questions. His answers will lead me to Hagenti, and—if you’re lucky—that will lead to your release.”

  The dolls conferred in silence before hopping down from their shelves in resignation. One by one, they hopped out of the open window to the fire escape, I turning back long enough to give her something like a middle finger before disappearing from view. They’d done this plenty of times before. All she had to do was wait. In the meantime, she downed her newest glass of bourbon and began preparing the water to wash her floors.

  The circumstances were not ideal. She had, after all, begun the day with a demon in her bedroom and she’d choke on all the herb that needed to be burned to cleanse that type of presence from the flat. But a thick undead aura had accumulated here, hanging like static in the air, so a little procedure was better than none.

  She started in the kitchen and scrubbed black salt and bergamot spirit water in circles into the wooden floors. For hours, she tried to move her mind toward peace so it would manifest when her cleaning was done, but she couldn’t shake thoughts of the violence she’d visit on Tommy when she found him. Her lips moved in their mantra, banishing all lingering malevolent spirits from this place, but thoughts of Carmen stuck in her mind as an ill she didn’t truly want gone. She scrubbed the adjoining rooms harder and tried to replace images of Carmen with Lonnie and then images of Lonnie with nothing at all.

  By the time she was done, she was eight fingers into a new bourbon bottle and it was not yet noon. She rested against the wall in her bedroom as sunlight began to work its way through the breaking clouds. Rain still dripped from the gutters and onto the fire escape but the gray sky beyond it was edged in gold that leaked unwelcome into the room.

  She was in no hurry to dismiss the mirage of Lonnie she daydreamed onto the bed. It was some blend of memories Dizzy had from sitting on the floor of their apartment on the other side of the city. Lonnie sat there, resplendent in some slouchy t-shirt, mouthing the words of some long-forgotten conversation while she framed another one of Dizzy’s show posters. She glanced up, a question reflected in her eyes. Whatever Dizzy’s response had been made her laugh.

  Dizzy smiled, too. Then she blinked and the room dimmed again. The phantom was gone.

  Her guitar in its case stood like a shadow beside the altar. She tapped out the rhythm of a song on her thigh for a long while before reaching for it. It had gotten to the point where the apple-red skin of the instrument seemed lurid and accusing against the perpetual cloud of her life. And in the face of what could certainly be another dead end, another failure to see Lonnie’s murderer repaid, she struggled with whether or not to grip it at all.

  “What’s the last song you played me?” said Lonnie’s voice.

  Dizzy looked up to see a memory of her again, standing by the window and staring down at her.

  “Play that one.”

  If Lonnie’s voice said to play, there wasn’t a thing alive or dead could keep her still. She propped the guitar on her lap and her fingers floated the places they belonged. As she began to strum and pluck and rock, she marveled at how the thing was still immaculately tuned as if it’d been waiting for her after all. Her voice, on the other hand, came to her as if strained through gravel.

  My love for you will never die...

  It was some song much older than she was, retread in dive bars and desert saloons and what was left of the old juke joints but Lonnie loved her version so that’s what she played. She found herself screaming the screaming parts with new anguish and knocking her beats on the wood veneer like it was a door to hell she wanted desperately to be let into if it meant the pain—the world—would just stop.

  And when she cried her last note and stillness settled over the room again, she was left with the ache of her fingers and a stone in her chest. Outside, the traffic kept moving.

  six

  It had been years since she’d drawn the chalk seeing circle on her bedroom floor. The dolls had been gone all day, and it was time to check on them. The sun was down and the yellows, violets, and blues of San Guin’s neon night had returned.

 

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