Suicide Kings, page 10
“I was misinformed,” Liam says. He looks behind him and sighs. “I should go see if my idiot nephew has managed to burn himself to a crisp. It was very nice meeting you.”
Liam turns and heads down the hall after Hans as Attila is coming out. They really look a lot alike. Attila says something I can’t hear. Liam answers, looks back at me, and gives me a broad smile before walking away.
Okay, what the fuck? I haven’t heard shit about Vegas in thirty years. So why am I hearing about it now from him?
My thoughts are interrupted by the sound of running footsteps. Great, now who wants to take a shot at me? I turn in time to see Amanda coming at me, Gabriela in tow. She throws herself at me with an enthusiastic hug and it takes everything I have not to scream.
“Oh god, you’re a hugger,” I say through clenched teeth.
“What? Oh, shit. I’m sorry. Are you all right? Of course, you’re not all right. Thank you. You have no idea how relieved I am that that’s over. Thank you. Especially for not dying.”
“Told you if I kicked, I’d make sure Otto went first,” I say. “And you can stop hugging me now, please.”
“Shit. Are you all right? I asked that already.”
“For him,” Gabriela says, “this is all right.”
“Pie,” Amanda says.
“I beg your pardon?”
“We need to go get pie. I know a place that’s open twenty-four hours and they have amazing pie. All three of us. We’re gonna get pie to celebrate. We’ll take my car.” Amanda hurries down the hall, looking over her shoulder. “Come on. Pie waits for no one.”
“Pie?” I say.
“She likes pie,” Gabriela says.
“Well, how could I refuse such enthusiasm?”
Gabriela laughs. “She can be a bit much sometimes.” In all the time I’ve known her, I’ve hardly ever heard Gabriela laugh. Like genuinely laugh, relaxed. The kind of laughter that lets you forget the bullshit of the world for a few minutes. People like us, we don’t really get the opportunity.
“Two of you are looking like BFFs,” I say. “Didn’t you only meet her last month?”
“Yeah,” Gabriela says. “Kinda took me by surprise, actually. She grows on you fast. If the world doesn’t shit too much on her she might actually turn out to be a decent human being.” One can hope.
“What was the deal with you being up in the box seat with her?” I say.
“Oh, we’re getting married.” I stop mid-stride and Gabriela laughs again.
“The look on your face. We’re not, we’re just telling her family we are.”
“Attila’s not gonna try to marry her off, is he?”
“No, it’s all for show. He’s in on this. But there are at least five different situations where she might be forced to marry.”
“The fuck is wrong with this family?”
“Right?” she says. “Anyway, she wants to nip that shit in the bud.”
“And scandalize the family?”
“And scandalize the family. They’re very old-school. You know. Homophobic. Racist. Shitbags. The usual.”
Up ahead Amanda takes a left at the wall and disappears. Gabriela heads toward the same spot and pauses when I don’t follow.
“Attila put in a door especially for us,” she says. “Now you won’t have to walk past your throng of screaming fans.”
“I have fans?”
“I don’t know what else to call a gaggle of terrified mages who want you to officiate at their goth weddings. They’re calling you the Black-Eyed Devil.”
“My eyes went dark?”
“As the void. Soon as you started the fight your eyeballs went all Nietzsche. Come on.” She steps through the wall and disappears. I follow and come out onto a still full parking lot.
When I first married Santa Muerte, my eyes went pitch black and stayed that way. As time went on, I eventually was able to turn them back, but ever since, whenever I channel Mictlantecuhtli’s power it happens again. Sometimes I can feel when it happens and will them back to normal. But I had other things on my mind this time.
Amanda’s a few car lengths ahead of us heading toward a silver Aston Martin with no other cars around it. The benefits of being the star of the night, I suppose.
“Great. The Black-Eyed Devil. I’m the monster under the bed, the Big Bad Wolf, and Baba Yaga all rolled up into one.” In Mexico some years back the Cartel heavies started calling me The Gringo With No Eyes.
“Anybody who saw you covered in blood, standing over Otto’s corpse with his head in one hand and that straight razor in the other, is going to think twice about fucking with you.”
“You would know.” Gabriela knows how to make appearances stick. That’s totally the sort of thing I can see her doing. She has cut off people’s heads and skinned them alive: sometimes to send a message, and sometimes just because they annoyed her.
“Honestly,” she says, “it was kinda hot. Speaking of which—”
“Did you feel that?” A sudden flare of magic, so slight it’s almost unnoticeable.
“No, I—Shit.”
I operate without thinking, maybe she does, too. Years of paranoia have honed our instincts to the point where we’ll do something and not know why until it’s done.
Amanda’s approaching her car when Gabriela reaches out with a spell and yanks her back over the top of the intervening cars to slam into her arms. Gabriela ducks and turns to shield her.
At the same instant I shove her car across the veil. It disappears, but I can just make it out over on the other side. I’ve sent over bigger things, like a speeding SUV. But I’ve never done it at a distance. I’m a little surprised that it worked.
Nothing happens. “What the hell?” Amanda says, pulling away from Gabriela.
“Give it a second,” I say. I see the car shimmer, go bright, darken. I pull it back. It’s barely recognizable as a car, just a twisted mass of still-melting steel and bubbling plastic. Thick, black smoke billows up from the wreckage. If it had gone off on this side it would have taken out a few rows of cars, and we sure as hell wouldn’t be standing here.
Amanda looks at the hulk that used to be a very nice Aston Martin. Any trace of the girl who ran up and nearly tackled me with a hug is gone. The Iron-Willed Princess is up to bat.
“Well, shit,” she says. “So much for pie.”
* * *
—
Werther brought a limousine to the event, because of course he did. Not that I’m complaining. The four of us are in the back, we have a driver, and most importantly, the car is not on fire.
“Is anyone else from your family in town?” I ask.
“By now? Certainly. The conclave begins the day after tomorrow.”
“Do you know who all’s going to be there?” Gabriela says.
“There aren’t that many left,” Attila says. “The last ten years have not been kind to my siblings. My sister Helga and her son Hans, who you’ve met.”
“You ran into Hans?” Amanda says.
“Yeah, he punched me, so I kicked him in the nuts and set him on fire. I’m not good at de-escalation.”
“There’s Liam, who you also met.”
“He needs killing,” I say. He’s the most dangerous thing I’ve met tonight. I know Attila’s strong, but I get the feeling Liam’s nasty.
“Yes,” Amanda says, her voice surprisingly subdued.
“Then, of course, there’s Otto.”
“Wait,” I say. “Otto? Otto whose head I’m pretty sure I chopped off? That Otto?”
“You did,” he says. “And yes.”
“And it was awesome,” Amanda says.
“He was dead for about a minute and a half before a stasis spell kicked in,” Werther says. “His medical staff have him. I hear he’s alive now, but I don’t know what state he’s in.”
“Do all your irritating family members have Get Out Of Dying Free cards, or is he special?”
“Special? No. Just lucky. We all have something, but there’s a limit on what they can do. Now if you’d pulped his brains . . .”
“I’ll keep that in mind for next time.”
Fantastic. Maybe I should track him down before he gets back on his feet and take his head off again. Speaking of which, there’s an unusual weight in my jacket pocket that I’m certain is the razor even though I left it in the locker room. It feels oddly comforting.
“Hans’s son Tobias will be there,” Amanda says. “He’s nineteen. I’ve met him before. Nice enough kid, I suppose. Hans and Otto treat him like shit, and Helga barely acknowledges his existence.”
“Just because they’re assholes?”
“Because Tobias has no power,” Attila says. “I think they like to let him run around in the hope someone will kill him for them.”
Jesus. My sister had no magic. But we didn’t hate her, and we certainly didn’t want to kill her. We didn’t lock her in the attic, though for a while we might as well have. We changed her name, never went out in public together. For the most part she stayed with another family, went to a regular high school. It was hard, but if we hadn’t, she never would have made it to her tenth birthday.
I left L.A. because of her. After I killed Boudreau I knew she was going to be a target. She was the most vulnerable. Eventually somebody would link the two of us and that would be that. She knew about magic, and how it worked, and theory, and all that. She just couldn’t do it. The safest thing for her was for me to not be there. So I left L.A. I came back to L.A. because of her, too.
“Tobias is the one they’re going to try to marry you off to?”
Amanda starts to say something, but Attila talks over her. “Likely,” he says. “But with Miz Cortez’s help that’s not something we should have to worry about.”
“Then there’s Siobhan,” Amanda says, jumping in before her father can cut her off again. “She’s a wild card. Not a lot of the family like her, so she tends to keep to herself.”
“She has a different mother than my other siblings,” Attila says. “Because of that and a few other things she has no claim to the inheritance, and she’s never shown any interest in pursuing it. As Amanda says, not many in the family care for her.”
“She handles businesses in Ireland and Wales,” Amanda says. “But beyond that she doesn’t have much involvement in the family. She’s a powerful mage but prefers to keep to herself. No partner, no children so far as I’ve heard. I think she has a half-brother, but I’m not sure.”
“She hasn’t been to a conclave in almost a hundred years,” Attila says. “I don’t expect to see her.”
“She comes to visit on her own every once in a while, though,” Amanda says. “She’s the only one I get along with. She’s a painter. She’s very good. I have some of her pieces.”
“Anyone else?” I ask.
“They can bring whoever they want to the conclave,” Amanda says. “Family and guests. I’m bringing Gabriela, Hans is probably bringing his lawyer.”
“Is that the sleazy one who was working for Otto?”
“Yes,” Attila says. “Watch out for him.”
“Good phrasing,” I say. “My eyes keep sliding off him. That a voluntary thing, or is it just something about him?” I prefer to keep track of the people I’m in a room with, and he raises all sorts of alarms.
“Like your seeing the dead, you mean? I don’t know. I have some people looking into him. He appears to be fairly incompetent at everything besides law, but I can’t afford to underestimate anyone coming to the conclave.”
“I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t suggest this, but why can’t you put bombs in all their rooms, or something? You know they all want you dead. Maybe take care of the problem before it becomes a problem?”
“I told Amanda the same thing,” Gabriela says. Of course she did.
“A few reasons,” Attila says. “At the moment we have a stability of sorts. The family is split, but we’ve had several losses over the last few years so no one has the numbers to turn things into an all-out civil war. The conclave helps ensure this.”
“I don’t see how,” I say. “You’re coming together to kill each other, not circle up and sing Kumbaya.”
“Limits the casualties,” Amanda says. She turns to look out the window. “Or so I’ve been told.”
Werther spares a glance for her before continuing. “We aren’t coming together to murder each other, much as it might seem that way. We have traditions to uphold, vows to renew. Large-scale business ventures that the family has to vote on, and so on.”
“Crimes to be judged,” Amanda says. “Or not.”
“The point is that it’s a framework that keeps the peace,” Attila says. “It has rules that need to be respected. And if they’re not—”
“Nothing happens,” Amanda says.
“Amanda.”
“No, Dad. This is bullshit. It was bullshit ten years ago and ten years before that and ten years before that. No one ‘respects the rules.’ They twist them so they can get away with whatever fucked-up depravity they come up with.
“If it were up to me, I’d murder every single one of them. Blow them up, slit their throats, poison, I don’t fucking care. Not a goddamn one of them is worth two shits. You know it. And worse, you let them get away with it.”
“What she said,” I say. “Just the little bit I’ve learned about you and your family, she’s got the right idea. You people are worse than the fucking Borgias. They’re all going to be in one place. Gas them. Drop a bomb on them. Shrink all their rooms until there’s nothing left but smears.”
“I believe we’re at your stop,” Werther says as the car pulls over. His voice is icy rage. But I don’t think he’s upset at me or even Amanda. I think he’s pointing that directly at himself.
The limo’s door pops open. I can take a hint. “Think about it is all I’m saying.”
“Which I believe were my words to you earlier this evening,” he says. “Good evening, Mister Carter.”
“Eric,” Gabriela says. “Call me.”
“Sure,” I lie. “Amanda, don’t get yourself killed over this archaic bullshit. Night, all. I’ve had a lovely time. Let’s never do this again.”
Chapter 10
Attila kicked me out of the limo on Washington Boulevard half a mile from my stop in Venice Beach, which is fine by me. I need some cold air to clear my head.
I’ve been staying at my sister’s house along the Venice Canals. It’s weird thinking of it that way, in the present tense, like she still owns it. But it feels accurate. Dead isn’t always dead. She’s somewhere, even if her meat suit’s in an urn.
This house is where she was brutally murdered, god, ten years ago? More? I can’t keep track of time anymore. She left a ghost, an Echo of her death repeating over and over again. It was cruel, and agonizing, and was done entirely to leave me a message. To push me over the edge. It worked.
The place has been fixed up, new furniture, paint, the works. But in the middle of the living room, Lucy kept dying. So I never stayed here.
A few years later, after I went up against Mictlantecuhtli and Santa Muerte, killing one and changing the other into something completely different, I came back to this house and I exorcised her ghost.
It was hard. This was the last thing, the only thing, to show me the woman she had grown up to be. I cherished the first minute of the Echo before everything went to shit and then agonized over the next half hour as it was all taken away.
And now I’m staying in her house. Even without her Echo, her presence is embedded in the place. She designed it, had it built, decorated, everything. Dead or alive, it’s always going to be her house. At the moment I just happen to be sleeping in it.
I head down Ocean and cut across to the Howland canal. It’s four a.m. The only noise is the lapping of the water in the canals and the bumping of rowboats against their tiny docks.
The house is warded, of course, and it looks like nobody’s messed with it. I bring enough of the wards down to enter the property and unlock the door.
Which is when the assassin makes his move. He’s good. I didn’t feel any magic. He was hiding somewhere nearby and I totally missed him. I usually get a feeling when someone’s watching me, and I’d like to think my situational awareness is fairly good, sucker punch from Hans notwithstanding, but it appears his is better.
The knife skims along my left arm, the tattoos I depend on for defense doing their job. More or less. They’re not perfect, but without them that knife would be in the back of my skull.
I spin around, the straight razor, which I don’t recall grabbing, open in my hand. But gift horses and all that.
The assassin is white, older, not too tall. Has a well-trimmed mustache and beard. He’s wearing, of all things, tweed. And a bow-tie. It gives him an academic air. Like he teaches at some posh Ivy League school but does wet work on the side.
“Can we reschedule this for tomorrow? I’ve had a really long day. I’m sure you can understand. I’m really not in the mood. Whattaya say? Rain check?”
He answers by flicking his fingers at me, three blades flying from his hand. They’re easy to avoid, and I know they’re not his main attack. He wants me to focus on them so he can come in with something bigger.
I step to the side and as he comes into where I’m going to be with a wicked-looking Bowie knife, I use a little magic to slide back where I started and take advantage of a clear shot at his neck.
I step in and slash with the razor, but he’s too fast. He’d be too fast even if I wasn’t exhausted. He ducks below the slash, brings his arm up over mine, trapping it, and yanks. Pain explodes inside my arm as he dislocates my shoulder.
The razor falls from my fingers. He kicks it behind him into the canal where it hits the water with a plop. I try for a knee to his crotch but he blocks it with his leg.
