Suicide Kings, page 13
“I don’t know all the details,” Amanda says, “but no, I don’t think so. He’s got no magic. What can he do?” A lot, but I get her point.
“And Liam, right?” Gabriela says.
“Liam. He could do it,” Amanda says. “But I think he would try something more direct and final. Even if he’s trying to avoid triggering the curse, I doubt he would have left that connection to the body.”
“Kind of a prick?”
“He murdered my mom at the last conclave,” Amanda says. “So yeah, I’d call him kind of a prick.”
“That’s a wrinkle we should explore,” I say. “Are we killing him?”
“I . . . No,” she says. “The restrictions on the curse are eased, but not as much for me as head of the family. None of us can kill each other directly, but we can be more directly involved. If one of them asked you to kill another outside the conclave and you did it, they’d get hit with the curse. During the conclave that won’t happen.”
“They can aim the gun but they can’t pull the trigger,” I say. “But it’s different for you?”
“I have to be at least one step removed. I could ask you to ask Gabriela to kill one of them.”
“What sort of restrictions do we have?” Gabriela says.
“You can do whatever you want as long as I don’t ask you to do it, and I’m not going to. I hate these people, god how I hate these people, but killing them all would cause more problems than it solves.”
“With more of them in the picture, the infighting keeps them occupied,” I say.
“Something like that. If they all banded together and went up against me—I don’t think I could stop them.”
“Okay,” I say. “I will try not to kill any of them. Unless they piss me off.”
“Same,” Gabriela says. “Just know that it’s pretty much guaranteed they’re going to piss me off.”
“Back to Liam. You don’t know if he’s bringing anyone with him.”
“No clue. He could bring a whole entourage, they all can if they want.”
There’s a pop over by the door and my first instinct is to grab Amanda and run for cover, but it’s just the house butler, Bigsby.
“Sorry to trouble you, ma’am,” Bigsby says. “But your guests have begun to arrive.”
“Oh no,” Amanda says. “They’re not supposed to be here until tomorrow. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Which one is it? Liam? Otto? They’re already in town. Goddammit.”
“Deep breath,” Gabriela says.
“It is Miz Siobhan Werther,” he says. “Shall I let her in?”
“What? No. I mean, yes. Let her in. I’ll—I’ll be there in a few minutes. One second.” She blinks. “There’s a new reception room just off the foyer now. Have her wait there.”
“Very good, ma’am.” Bigsby disappears with a pop.
“Isn’t she the one no one’s seen in years?” I say.
“Yes,” Amanda says. “Only one I get along with, but I don’t know if I can trust her. Not with this.”
“Wild card’s in play,” Gabriela says. “Game just got more interesting.”
Chapter 12
We agree that it would be best if no one knows I’m here until the conclave officially starts. Everyone’s been told about Gabriela, but no one is expecting me. There’s already a sizable surprise with Siobhan showing up. I’ll stay out of sight until the festivities start tomorrow. It’ll give me a chance to run some errands and spend more time investigating that thread to Attila’s soul. I slide to the dead side outside the house and see it heading off into the distance.
The layout here is still exactly the same as the other side, which creeps me out a little. There are no ghosts, of course. There’s no way Amanda or Attila would allow that. That does give me an idea, though.
“Bigsby?”
He appears in front of me looking as professional and proper as always. It’s a little startling. The only people-shaped things I ever see on this side try to eat me.
“How can I be of assistance, sir?”
“Had a couple questions,” I say. “Can you see this thread?”
“I can indeed, sir. It extends through the arboretum, out past the woods to the border of the estate. Presumably, it is attached to Mister Werther’s body, but since Miss Amanda has frozen the room containing said body, I cannot be certain.” Interesting. Whatever Bigsby is, it’s not omniscient.
“Are there places you can’t go?”
“Private rooms unless specifically requested by the rightful occupant, restrooms, and the like, as well as areas that have been locked through magic, such as the medical suite holding Mister Werther’s body.”
So he’s got eyes and ears almost everywhere on the estate. I assume Amanda knows that, but I’ll want to check.
“Was Werther’s study one of those areas?”
“I don’t believe so, no.”
“You don’t know?”
“During the transfer of ownership certain of my abilities were temporarily curtailed. I have been given to believe it is much like the process of rebooting a computer. Unfortunately, my most recent memories are unavailable until the process completes.”
“And that takes how long?”
“Unknown, sir. This is the first time in my existence that this has happened.”
This can’t be a coincidence. Whoever took Werther’s soul had to know that the estate wouldn’t remember who or even if someone was in Werther’s study. Triggering the inheritance to move to Amanda might be part of a larger plan, or just a side-effect of Werther’s—I have a hard time calling it murder, but I suppose that’s technically true. Kidnapping? I’ll go with kidnapping.
“Do you know what this thread is?”
“I do not, sir. However, I-I-I—” Bigsby stutters. First his voice and then his entire body flickers. Before I can blink, he is nothing but a man-shaped mass of jagged lines and smears of color.
I have no idea what’s happening or what to do about it, which usually means I should get the hell out of there before whatever it is gets worse.
It gets worse. Bigsby moves like lightning, grabbing me by the throat and lifting me off the ground. I try to slide back to the other side, but whatever Bigsby is now isn’t letting me go.
I crank up a push spell and try to force the things that used to be Bigsby’s fingers off my throat. Nothing. My vision is starting to go dark around the edges.
A sudden weight in my hand, and without looking I know what it is. I swing the straight razor at the thing’s wrist, but it passes right through. At first I think it’s done nothing. Then I fall to the ground with the severed hand going slack around my throat.
I go after the legs next. There’s no resistance, like I’m slashing at smoke, but the legs sever at the knees and the thing falls to the ground. It’s still going, its remaining hand reaching out and the body writhing toward me like a fat, staticky snake.
I cut off the arms, the rest of the legs, the head. Not only is the torso still moving, the rest of the pieces are getting in on the action.
I could just slide back to the other side and let it do whatever it’s going to do, but I know I’m going to have to come back here and I don’t want to get ambushed by a pissed-off hand.
On this side, if I really need to get rid of a ghost, I’ll pull it in and devour it. Not as bad as an actual soul, but never fun. There is no way I’m going to try that with this thing.
The other option would be to trap it. Ghost traps are relatively easy. You can use anything from a bottle to a piece of cloth. I trapped a few thousand ghosts in a pallet of paper in Hong Kong years back.
I don’t know if a trap would work here, but I’m willing to give it a try. Trapping a ghost in an actual container, like a bottle or a box, works better than trying to place it within a solid object, like embedding it into a piece of paper. I rifle through my messenger bag and the only thing I come up with are the bottles of Vicodin and Adderall I tossed in earlier. I really need to start carrying stoppered vials again.
The pieces of ex-Bigsby are still moving toward me, but slowly. Hard to go very fast when you have to wiggle your way around like a maggot. I empty one bottle of pills into the other, then take the empty and place it on the ground, open end toward the oncoming body parts. I kick a couple of them closer to the torso; a hand grabs onto my pantleg and I have to pry it off and toss it back near the others.
I don’t know if this thing can re-form, so I don’t want to waste time, but I take a moment to look around to make sure I’m not missing any parts. With a ghost I’d spill some blood to help the magic along, and also as bait. Might as well do the same here.
“You lop my hand off and you’re going back in the box,” I say to the razor. “You know that, right?” If it’s sentient enough to understand, it doesn’t give me any indication. Here’s hoping Werther was right that it won’t slice off my hand.
A quick slash on a patch of my inner left forearm devoid of tattoos. On my old body it was a mass of keloid scars from decades of cuts. But there are only a few barely visible scars from the few times I’ve done this on the new one.
I let a few drops fall onto the bottle and cast a binding spell. I don’t know what to expect, but it seems to work just as well as it would with a ghost. The spell draws all the pieces toward the bottle, where they turn to smoke before being sucked in. When the last one goes, I stick the cap back on. Using the child safety cap side, of course.
I don’t know why that worked. Not saying I’m not glad it did, I just don’t understand it. Ex-Bigsby wasn’t a ghost, but apparently it was similar enough that I could trap it the same way. I just hope it won’t figure out how to escape.
Now that that’s handled, I finally notice how much my throat hurts. If the razor had waited a moment longer, Bigsby probably would have crushed my trachea. But that’ll have to wait. If Bigsby changed on this side, what the hell happened on the other? I flip back to the living side—though I’m starting to wonder if the idea of sides even applies here—razor in hand.
“Bigsby?”
“Yes, sir?”
It appears behind me and I spin, ducking low and cutting it off at the knees. Instead of falling to pieces, it turns to smoke.
Another one forms behind me. “I take it something’s wrong, sir,” it says. It doesn’t seem any more murdery than before it changed on the other side.
“You don’t know?” I say. “Turning into some technicolor static thing and coming at me?”
“No, sir. I don’t recall that happening.” It pauses. “However, I have just noted a gap in my memory. It’s less than a second, but it appears some part has been erased and stitched back together. I fear I may be compromised.”
“Yeah, I’ll say. Where are Amanda and Gabriela?”
“Speaking with Siobhan, sir. I’m informing Miss Amanda of my state now.”
“Can you do it discreetly?” Bigsby changed after Siobhan showed up. Could be coincidence. I don’t like coincidences. Either way, I don’t want to tip her off to anything that might be wrong.
“Yes, sir. Only Miss Amanda will get the message. She’s told me to go to sleep until she can get things sorted out. Do you need anything before I go, sir?”
“Yeah. Let Amanda know I have to leave for a while. I’ll be back later tonight. She can call me if she wants.”
“Very good, sir. She’s received the message. Goodbye.”
And like that, Bigsby’s gone. I need to talk to Amanda about what happened, get a better understanding of what Bigsby is, maybe figure out how someone fucked with it.
Speaking of, what the hell even happened? It was about to tell me something about the thread when it went all murder-butler on me. Either I triggered a trap that was already in place, or somebody’s paying attention. Whether to Bigsby, me, or just what’s happening around Werther’s soul, I don’t know.
Where does it go? The edge of the estate? When I touched the thread, I got the feeling that Werther’s soul wasn’t here. Could take me hours to find it. What’s outside the estate? I don’t know how pocket universes are built. My only experience with them is the room in the ghost of the Ambassador Hotel. That one was a trap, designed to collapse in on itself. It was built using the forces of other worlds pressing on it in equal measure, so that if one part was breached the whole thing imploded like a black hole.
Werther built it. I can’t imagine he didn’t build this one, too. If he used the same technique, then there’s something on the other side of the boundary. I wonder if the thread is weakening the structure. This one is a thousand times larger than the hotel room. Werther wouldn’t live here, or especially let Amanda live here, if he didn’t think it was a fortress.
What sort of magic could drill a hole through a universe? It had to come from someone who knew how the universe was built, understood what it could and couldn’t withstand. My money’s on one of his siblings, but I don’t know enough about any of them to make a guess as to which.
The thread is really more like a cable, thin strands all woven together. I walk back to make sure I’m seeing it correctly. It’s noticeable, but only because I’m looking for it. Why? How far does it go? Where does it lead? More questions than answers. Anything I come up with is sheer guesswork and I’ve no way to know what’s true.
I need to talk to Amanda about it, but I can’t right now. Not while she and Gabriela are with Siobhan. I text Gabriela, telling her to call me when she has some time. Less suspicious if she gets a text than if Amanda does. I get a text back with a thumbs-up emoji.
Great. Now if the rest of the day can be less mysterious and murdery I’ll count it a success.
* * *
—
My first night back from the dead I wound up at a church. There are so many levels of irony there I don’t know how to even start unpacking it.
A small community of refugees from the fires had set up in the parking lot of a half-burned church. The pastor was apparently Unitarian, which I never really believed existed except to give out online minister certificates so people could officiate weddings. Shows what I know.
The next morning I met one of the people there, Lani, still don’t know her last name, and her ten-year-old son, Matthew. They’re close to the South L.A. Toxic Zone, where all the chemicals that got thrown into the air when the city of Vernon exploded hang like some magical, horror-story mist.
Which it is. A group of mages contained it and have been trying to figure out how to safely get rid of it without killing everyone else in the county. Tall order. Disaster like that, coupled with the fires and enough magic being thrown around the city to crack a planet, it’s turned into way worse than just a toxic cloud.
For starters nobody can go in. Literally. Twenty feet in and they keel over. Doesn’t matter what kind of protective gear they’re wearing. Gas masks, NBC suits, airtight APCs. I saw a downed helicopter in there one time. Somebody flew too close and came tumbling down like Icarus.
The only gear that keeps people alive is magical. I’ve got a set of talismans Gabriela gave me that lets me survive the place. With those, the air, if you can call it that, is breathable, the killing magic doesn’t touch me.
Without those I’d just be another not-rotting corpse lying in the street. That’s one of the weirder things about it. Bodies don’t decay. I’ve been tempted to try animating one to see what would happen, but a place like that make the chance it could go horribly wrong more than I’m comfortable with.
There are a bunch of egghead mages living inside a protective bubble at the emptied-out USC campus trying to figure it out, but they need to get their asses in gear. It’s been hovering over that section of the city like an immobile stormfront for the last five years.
Of course, people have noticed. All sorts of conspiracy theories about it. Every news story is just one more theory, the weirder the better.
That’s because of us mages. Compared to the rest of the population we’re not that many, but more than enough to infiltrate high positions all over the world and control at least some of the messaging and media. They’ve been pushing every theory imaginable online except the one we don’t want to get out there: magic. Honestly, I’m a little surprised that they’ve even contained the cloud itself. Not that they were able, but that they cared enough to do it.
Hiding magic on that big a scale is like our number one priority. Not that I necessarily care one way or the other, but letting the normals know we exist isn’t really a good strategy for keeping us all from being rounded up to be burned at the stake. That would not go well for anyone, particularly the normals.
Which is why we tend to stay away from them. Lots of them know we exist and what we can do, or they’ve got just enough magic to call themselves a talent, if not a full-on mage. Wizard. Witch. We don’t really have a good naming convention on that front.
So it’s a little weird that I’ve been coming back to this camp every few days and bringing food, water, fuel for the generators. City services aren’t online everywhere, and this close to the Toxic Zone isn’t a priority. I show up, I drop stuff off, and I linger just enough to acknowledge the overenthusiastic thank-yous.
I brought this calamity down upon them, least I can do is make sure they can eat. There are a couple other reasons; one of them is Lani. She’s nice. I like her. She’s normal. Almost too normal. But it feels comfortable to be around her. I’m not getting close and I’m not interested in any sexual way. Being around her just feels a little grounding.
That’s started to spread to the entire camp. I’m a regular. I get offers of food, drink, dates. I politely turn them all down.
The other reason I show up is Rosalie.
“Hey, Rose,” I say, tapping on the rainfly covering her tent. It’s been sprinkling, which of course for Angelenos means Noah’s flood is upon us, but it hasn’t gotten too heavy, yet. “It’s Eric.”
