She wondered how long he’d been in San Guin, how long it took to make himself king and what the endgame was. Carmen said something about the balance shifting. Demons were becoming more interested in the city. There was already a tenuous balance of life and un-life here. More demons could only mean trouble.

  More than one person had told her that wasn’t her business, though. For now, she could believe them. What she needed was Lonnie back. And for that to happen, she needed a way to dispatch a demon.

  “Wait here,” she told the dolls in her back seat. II climbed up by the rear window to make a show of bashing his tiny head against the glass as she exited the car.

  Instead of going inside, she crossed over to Mark Street, past the pocket bars and street vendors to the alley behind the noodle shop where she knew the Colorman’s Disciples were undoubtedly up to something they shouldn’t have been up to. These were thieves and graffiti artists casually known as Krylon Kids. And they were as adept as rats at getting into places you didn’t want them to go.

  Dizzy would have to avoid cameras. There was no telling what would become of the God’s Eye system once whatever remained of Tommy was discovered. And her brand of magic required time and concentration. There would be no brawling with a bull. She had to set the stage herself.

  She wound through the typical scenes of late-night debauchery, past silhouettes of the casual dead in their enjoyment of watching life, and into a hazy, bass-thumping dark behind the noodle shop. An all-consuming mural of the Krylon King himself occupied the rear wall of an apartment building on the opposite side of the alley, rendered in high definition.

  The Colorman on the wall sat cross-legged, dapper in a teal blue suit, twelve arms fanned around him like peacock feathers, each ending in a dark brown hand pointing in this or that direction. His bed was stark white clouds crisply lined in cerise no. 45 and the gold piled along his neck and wrists glinted in metallic goldenrod.

  The rest of the long block wall was painted in tessellated starbursts like radiated tortoise shells. It was an improvement if you didn’t mind the company. The Disciples threw up these murals wherever the Colorman needed eyes. They became doorways the kids could use like portals throughout the city to flee police after this or that criminal or mischievous enterprise.

  Dizzy paused in rounding the corner in time to see three people come crashing through the Colorman’s door. They were bundles of dark clothing, the only color flashing on the bottom of their sneakers. Each was panting and stumbling and carrying backpacks full of who-knows-what as they skidded to a stop before smashing into the next wall and pivoting to take off past her toward the street.

  Close on their heels, another form skidded through the door. This one, a hellhound, the vantablack, musclebound pups kept as pets by the heads of the global gangs.

  Dizzy blinked surprise, remaining stock still in the corner by a dumpster. What you didn’t want was a hellhound to find you interesting.

  This one was dotted with lime green handprints and seemed more than a little pissed off about it. It darted off after them. Screams and angry car horns were added to the sounds of Front Street, pierced by the dog’s deep and chilling bark.

  A whistle.

  Dizzy turned back to the mural and the alleyway. The Colorman’s eyes flicked in Dizzy’s direction.

  Six kids in various states of obscured identity halted in the shaking of their spray paint cans and looked at her.

  “You lost?” one of the masked kids called from atop a fire escape.

  “Not at all,” Dizzy called back. She gave the Colorman a lazy salute so as not to seem rude. “Who here can I talk to about a job?”

  A girl on the ground with her hair in lime streaked cornrows sauntered over and lifted her gas mask. “Noodle spot’s got applications. You look like you could wait a good table.” She smirked.

  “No, I need to hire you. I need a gateway into the Gōrudo Theatre in the next couple days. You know it?”

  “We don’t know what you’re talking about.” She sniffed dismissively. Two of her friends began walking over for support.

  “I’m not a cop. You know this man?” Dizzy showed the girl a picture of Niles Heating standing beneath a backlit sign for Heating Power & Light.

  The girl glanced back at her friends and then at Dizzy as if to ask if she was crazy. “Sure, we know him.”

  “Then you know he’s loaded. You might have even done some work for him in the past. I heard he has a thing for stolen art.”

  “Like I said, we don’t kno⁠—”

  “I don’t care. You get me into the Gōrudo, you get access to all of his shit and you’ll get to it before one of the global gangs does.”

  “How?” asked one of the kids who’d just joined them. “You gonna take him out?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dizzy replied with a shrug, shoving her phone back into her pocket. “So?”

  The leader was silent for a second, wanting to appear thoughtful and measured in front of an adult. Dizzy allowed the performance.

  “I’ll talk to the boss,” she said finally.

  “Good. I’ll be back here the night after tomorrow.” Dizzy winked at the Colorman’s mural and his eyes returned to their neutral position.

  She nodded at N in her stall on the way home. For once, she didn’t feel the need for a drink.

  eight

  Hagenti’s show was a semi-formal, invitation-only event, and Dizzy wasn’t the type to be invited anywhere. Carmen, on the other hand, could charm her way into any building that wasn’t a church; Dizzy asked for her help getting in and she obliged.

  She parked outside the Rising Sun, chewing too hard on flavorless gum and idly itching the cut in her palm she’d used to make more bloodstones. Her other hand was still stained with the paint mark that granted her passage through the Colorman’s gateway.

  She turned over the plan in her mind. There was no mention in the news, not about Tomas or what was left of him in that basement. If he was still there, still rotting, it didn’t matter much to her. But it was more likely he’d failed to check in and someone more interesting than San Guin’s finest went looking for him and cleaned up what they found.

  In any case, she might just be on someone’s radar now. She would have one chance—her last chance—to finish this.

  Carmen emerged from the wrought-iron doors in a tempting blue dress something like the devil might wear. Dizzy got out in her own shirtsleeves and suspenders and moved around to open the passenger-side door for her.

  “My, my, my Dizzy Carter. Do they still say chivalry is dead?” Carmen smiled.

  “I’m not a complete animal.” Dizzy kissed her gently. “Now you can’t say I never take you anywhere.”

  “Ha!” Carmen cackled as she settled into the car and Dizzy closed the door.

  “Ash coming?” Dizzy asked as she started the engine.

  “She’s already there. How are you? You alright?”

  “Just hot,” said Dizzy, not exactly lying. “You know how long it’s been since I’ve worn a tie?”

  The Vintage District was sort of an artisan’s refuge, a few blocks of buildings, workshops, and warehouses that hadn’t been renovated in decades, just adapted because nothing said “I’m an artist” like bare brick and living in old-world squalor. Dizzy knew it well. Her music flourished here.

  The Gōrudo Theatre was undoubtedly the jewel of the place with its scalloped gold facade and stained glass dome rising high on a block of experimental art galleries and low-key 24-hour brunch spots. It was once a great operatic venue, but opera was long dead. She’d snuck inside to poke around and rehearse in its acoustic environment growing up. But tonight was the first time Dizzy had ever seen the building alive with light.

  Dizzy parked across the street in front of a bare brick diner that smelled of brunch. The Theatre offered valet service, but again, no one drove stick anymore.

  “That smells amazing,” Carmen mused as they crossed the street. “When this is done, I could see this being appropriate for a proper date if you’re looking for ideas.”

  “Noted,” Dizzy replied, putting on her jacket. Her attention was on the people entering the building, on the people wandering happily just inside the gallery doors and beyond them to the off-limits theatre floor she would need access to later. It was one thing to get up there with a skeleton crew on the grounds. Now that the place was swarming with people—any number of whom could be part of the Legions—things seemed a bit more complicated.

  Carmen got them checked off with the doorman and they made their way inside. The trendy art-lovers-of-influence mingled on the polished marble floors of the lobby, drinking champagne and taking in the near ancient architecture of the interior. Chandeliers of colored crystal hung massive from the vaulted ceiling and dramatic fabric tapestries of winged muses and creatures in noh masks lined the walls. From cracked balustrades to iridescent threads braided into silk drapes, everything was somehow accented in gold.

  The crimson-carpeted grand staircase to the theatre floor was blocked by velvet ropes and the sorts of bored men whose one job it was to keep drunken party-goers from sneaking off to it. They watched Dizzy. Or rather they watched Carmen—the men did, anyway.

  “You know you don’t have to stay,” Dizzy said as they made their way to the showroom.

  “Relax. I’m supposed to be a distraction, remember?” Carmen assured her, and plucked a champagne glass from a gobsmacked caterer’s tray.

  Dizzy hated to admit Carmen was right almost as much as she hated the idea of using her this way. But cameras were everywhere and she needed Carmen’s allure to distract them when she separated Mr. Heating from his magician.

  They weaved their way through colorful sculptures of blown glass on pedestals in the gallery, some with items like car keys and cotton hearts with needles in them suspended at their centers. The happy faces and the aloof ones of art cynics equally had no idea they were here on the invitation of a murderer. And if they did, they didn’t show it bothered them any.

  Twenty minutes into the search, Dizzy began to scowl.

  “So what do I call you now?” Carmen finally asked to the back of the tall, dark man in what had to be a vantablack suit. “Is it Mr. Heating now or is Gen still good?”

  He turned to reveal a handsome and neatly-bearded face, twinkling eyes and a plain gold ring in his nose. His teeth were a startling white as he smiled down at them.

  “Carmen,” he greeted her in an impressive baritone, took her hand, and kissed it. “You can call me whatever you’d like.”

  “Heard you were in town and I couldn’t stay away. This is Desdemona, my…paramour,” she purred. Dizzy could tell by the cool mischief in her eyes that she enjoyed the little dig.

  “Dizzy is fine,” she said, inspecting Hagenti’s expression for any hint that he recognized her from his surveillance of Lonnie’s life.

  “Welcome, Dizzy,” he said, smiling in a disarmingly warm way. Dizzy’s jaw clenched as she thought about this same charm being used to lure Lonnie. She stifled her rage for now.

  The shorter man beside him had turned around as well. He was older, or at least human enough to exhibit age. The skin of his face seemed irritated, like he’d been sunburned and then piled on makeup to hide it. He was decidedly less attractive but the smirk resting on his leathery face suggested he didn’t know it.

  The man in white.

  “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” the man said in a sing-song voice as he shook Carmen’s hand. “I’m Walter. Old friend of Mr. Heating.”

  “Interesting. I thought I knew all of his old friends,” Carmen purred. Her lidded gaze flickered over him as if he wasn’t really there.

  “Not quite,” Walter simpered, still staring at Dizzy. No one else seemed to notice he hadn’t offered her his hand. Just as well. She’d have ripped it off.

  “This is quite a show, Gen,” Carmen said.

  “Well, what you walked through were all pieces commissioned from artisans I’ve met through my travels. Truly inspiring human beings with such uniqueness to their processes I just had to have them. These are mine.” He gestured toward one long wall where glittering, glistening, jewel-toned broken glass embedded in eight hanging canvases hung as if bottles had been thrown at them and stayed where they shattered beautifully.

  Dizzy’s eye twitched. Eight canvases of shattered glass. Eight crime scenes of shattered people. Which of these was meant to be Lonnie?

  “Brilliant, isn’t it?” Walter’s eyes sparked as the four of them walked among the works. “Mr. Heating’s eye for the beauty in unmade things is unmatched in my experience.”

  “So much is made to serve such small purpose,” Mr. Heating mused. “These glass bottles were vessels for other things deemed more important than the vessels themselves. It was only by taking them apart—even in such a violent way—that they were elevated to something more than debris.”

  Carmen and Dizzy glanced at each other as if asking silently if he meant to be this on-the-nose with his ravings. They stopped in front of a canvas of sunny orange glass. Under this light and from the right angle it did seem to spiral into a pattern of splayed limbs. Like an angel with a broken back.

  “I don’t see it,” Dizzy said flatly. Mr. Heating’s smile faltered a moment but Walter’s persisted.

  “I’m sorry,” Mr. Heating scoffed. “What do you mean you don’t see it?”

  Dizzy fought to keep her eyebrow from raising and shrugged instead. “Looks like a tantrum to me. Something a toddler would do if you kept glass around him. And if you don’t mind some criticism…”

  “Why would I mind?” he asked quickly, defensively, his forced smile twitching on his lips.

  “Well you’ve taken something perfectly whole and, as you said, purposeful, that in its intact state could have lived a hundred lives as a vessel for other things,” Dizzy said smoothly. “And instead of appreciating its beautiful parts when whole, you shattered it. Destroyed it. And reduced it to something only good for looking at. In any other context, this is a mess of pieces for someone else to pick up, try and salvage or just throw away.”

  She knew perfectly well the screws she was twisting. Carmen gave her a look that implied she should reel it in while Mr. Heating tutted and sputtered for something to say.

  “Well, not all art is for everyone,” Walter volunteered, and passed around champagne flutes from a passing tray.

  Dizzy downed hers almost immediately as Carmen linked arms with the other demon and changed the subject.

  There was no way Walter wasn’t the magician, she thought. He had all the insufferable entitlement of someone who’d attached himself to immortality by any means necessary. And he knew her in a way that Hagenti—in all his focus on the art and none of the logistics—did not. She didn’t put it past him to have orchestrated the grabbing of victims for his master to transform.

  Walter excused himself from their group and headed up a short flight of stairs on the far side of the exhibit to the restroom. Dizzy whispered in Carmen’s ear that it was time to move.

  She followed Walter’s path, looking back to make sure Carmen excused herself from Mr. Heating as they’d discussed. Things were going to get sticky and there was no way to know what would happen once the magician died. It was best to plan for havoc.

  A uniformed attendant leaning against a counter just inside the door winked at Dizzy. It took her a moment to realize the attendant was Ash looking more like a working-class drag king than her usually made-up self. Beside her on the counter was the small wooden box Dizzy had handed over earlier in the day, containing her dolls.

  Ash tapped the box and went to take her leave. “Still two ladies in here. Should be out soon,” she said quietly.

  Dizzy nodded and took the box from her. She waited in the powder room, an antechamber to the toilets furnished with mirrors and striped couches, for the two other women to leave before locking the door behind them. Walter was washing his hands as she emerged from the doorway.

  He only glanced up. “Miss Baxter would have been Mr. Heating’s finest piece,” he cooed. “He was so taken with her. Her beauty. Her spirit. But you know all about that, don’t you? It’s that tenacity of hers we underestimated. Mr. Heating was disappointed to lose her. We drugged all of them so they felt no pain by the end. Funny how she didn’t go to the police. But in her delirium, all she was looking for was you.”

  He took a beat to dry his hands and found no kindness or even interest in Dizzy’s face as she undid her jacket and hung it on a stall door.

  “I saw what happened to Mr. Pascal. I’ll admit I’m surprised to see you again,” he shouted over the dryer. “I’d say it’s a small world but I suppose this isn’t an accident on your part. What are you here for? To turn us in? Finally get some justice?”

  “Where is Lonnie?” Dizzy asked, rolling her sleeves.

  He stared at her a moment, frowning for the first time that night. “I don’t understand. She’s dead, dear. Quite dead. Six years dead.”

  “Not quite, no,” Dizzy said, irritation mounting in her voice. “You and the bull have her ghost and I want it back.”

  “Aren’t we the astute little witch.”

  “Smarmy fuck…”

  “My dear I’m afraid you are out of your depth here,” he said. His voice dripped with condescension. “A demon’s got nothing to do with the dead.”

  Dizzy flipped the latch on the box and placed the dolls at her feet.

  “One last time, boys,” she sighed and they began to grow into her monsters. She was immune to Walter’s gaze now. A dozen men had all had the same horrified expressions when presented with her dolls. Some of them pleaded automatically. Others played hard to get. The magician seemed inclined to the latter but his calm facade was cracked. That, too, happened sometimes.

  “Hold him still,” she commanded, and the hulking splinter creatures dashed to pin him hard to the wall. Their razor-thin spines sliced into the sleeves of his suit and the collar of his shirt and thin blood lines appeared in the cuts. He was looking much more horrified now, staring into their hollow faces instead of at Dizzy. She approached and pressed her thumbs to the inner corners of his eyes and began reciting her runes again.

 

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