Suicide Kings, page 2
From the door I can tell he’s definitely been enhanced through magic. It looks almost like one of those Halloween muscle suits but not as severe. There are bulges in unusual places that give it away, and he hasn’t gotten used to walking yet. Other than that, there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about him. Not quite six feet tall, red hair, light freckled skin. His skin is bright red from the fight, slick with sweat. For all that he’s shivering.
I go in and close the door behind me. The noise grabs his attention. He jerks around to face me but doesn’t say anything. He has prison tats, a couple of . . . I don’t know what the fuck they’re supposed to be. Really screwed up swastikas or Nazi SS symbols? One on each pec. The ensemble is completed with an 88 on his belly that looks like the artist was on too much meth at the time. Tats like that should get him into all the right parties.
But the thing that sticks out is his eyes. They can’t decide what color they’re supposed to be. Brown, blue, brown again. Shapes in his irises flow like clouds blown about by stormy winds.
“Nice fight out there tonight,” I say.
“Thanks,” he says. Distant, but at least he’s acknowledging me. The high must be wearing off.
“How many are you up to a week now?”
“Fights? Two, three. Hey, if you’re, like, a promoter, or something, I’m not interested.” He turns back to the mirror and ignores me.
“I get that,” I say. “You go pro, you’re gonna get a lot more scrutiny. Folks might start to put some things together. Maybe figure out what you’re really doing. Can’t have that.”
He turns back to me, startled as if seeing me there for the first time. “The fuck are you still doing here?”
“Having a conversation,” I say. “That’s all.” I don’t stop moving, just slowly walking toward him, hands at my sides, empty.
“Yeah, well, go fuck off. I’m not—”
“They’re like potato chips, aren’t they? Can’t eat just one. And the best part? Nobody knows what you’re doing.” He glances from me to the door and back. I can almost see the wheels turning in his head. “I don’t think you want to do that,” I say.
“What?”
“You think you can get through me and out of here. You won’t.”
“Who the fuck are you?” He starts to pull power in from the local pool of magic, but he’s not very good at it. He might not even realize he’s doing it. It’s like he’s an engine that can’t quite start.
“Nobody important,” I say. “Where’d you do your time? Corcoran?”
“If you don’t get the fuck out of here in ten seconds I’m gonna kick your ass.”
“That where it started? Prison? Stress can bring out latent talents.”
“I’m countin’, man. Ten.”
“Must have been easy there. You walk by, bump into somebody in the yard, and down he goes.”
“I ain’t killed nobody,” he says. “Nine.”
“Horseshit and you know it. They’re more dead than if you put a bullet in their brain.”
“Eight.”
“Bodies are just meat,” I say. “But souls are where the flavor’s at.” I’m about five feet away from him and he’s getting really nervous. He looks like he should be able to take me, but that’ll never happen.
“Seven, motherfucker.”
“How long have you been seeing the ghosts?”
Silence. “How do you know about that?” he says, his voice a terrified whisper.
“You thought you were going crazy. Nobody else could see them. And they’re everywhere. Fuck, a prison yard must be crawling with them. You saw them and they could see you. So you keep your head down, do your time, and when you get out it’s all phone psychics, carnival card readers, some weird guy in a dark room with a crystal ball. Not a one of them knew what the fuck they were talking about. That about right?”
“The fuck am I?”
“You’re a necromancer,” I say. “A really bad one. Not your fault, really. Your knack showed up too late and you only figured out one trick. But it’s a whopper. And stealing souls feels pretty fucking awesome, doesn’t it?”
“Shit, dude. It’s the best high I’ve ever had,” he says.
“Can’t stomach them myself. It’s like swallowing razorblades and puking up grenades. Kind of an acquired taste, I’ve heard. But see, once you got it, you want more and more and then I’m the guy who gets called to solve your problem.”
I see what he’s doing long before he tries it. He telegraphs too much. He throws himself at me as I step out of the way and he hits the floor. He scrambles to his feet. I put my hands in my pockets.
“Come on,” I say. “You can do better than that.”
He puts his arms out wide and tries to tackle me, but he’s too cumbersome and I’m out of his way before he can get close enough.
“Dude, I’m right here. I’m not even trying to fight you.”
“I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you.”
“Tell you what,” I say, stepping close. “Free shot. Go for it.” He gets his hand around my throat and does what he’s been doing in the ring for weeks. I can feel him going after my soul. I let him take hold of it.
Like a fish taking bait. Suddenly the energy reverses as I reel him in. I get under the spots where his soul attaches to his body and go through them like a crowbar through a windshield.
If he were much more powerful or knew more about his own magic, I wouldn’t be able to do this. But he’s young, untrained and stupid. His grip slackens and he tries to pull away, but now I’ve got my hands on him and I’m not letting go. He’d been pulling out souls in one quick yank. Messy. Left a lot of shreds behind. Just enough so the body keeps breathing.
This way’s cleaner, if you can call ripping a man’s soul out of his body like pulling off a sheet of toilet paper clean. I get the whole thing. His eyes roll up in the back of his head and his body hits the floor.
It’s always weird to me how souls, no matter who they belong to, look like thin gold and silver lace. They’re beautiful things even when they’re owned by monsters. I hold Johnny’s in my hand, feeling it struggle to move on.
Normally, it would drift off to wherever it’s supposed to go, and if I release it, that’s exactly what it’ll do. But who knows where that will be. I doubt any kind of Hell is waiting for him. Justice doesn’t exist in this universe.
The first few bars of NWA’s “Fuck tha Police” plays from my pocket. I don’t give my number to too many people and that ringtone is reserved for Letitia, a friend . . . -ish? Anyway, she’s a mage who stabbed me in high school. I don’t remember why, but I’m pretty sure I deserved it. I fish the phone out of my pocket and accept the call.
“Hey,” I say. “What’s up?”
“Got a situation could use your expertise,” she says.
“Messy?”
“Very,” she says. “You busy?” I close my hand into a fist, squeezing Lightning Johnny’s soul into a burst of heat that fades away to nothing.
“Nothing important,” I say. “Text me the address.”
Chapter 2
Who are you? Not your name, not your title, not your gender. All those are things about you, no matter how much you identify with them. But what makes you you?
Your memories. Everything you remember is a building block of your identity. They’re what sets you apart from everyone else. You can witness the same event with a thousand other people, but your experience of it isn’t going to be like anyone else’s.
Memory gives us context, meaning. Yesterday builds the foundation for today, which builds the foundation for tomorrow. Take away your memories and you stop being you.
What happens when you add some? What happens when you add a lot?
I am Eric Carter, necromancer, smart ass, maker of poor life choices. I looked into a god’s eyes as I murdered him.
I am Mictlantecuhtli, Aztec god of the dead, guardian of Mictlan, thousands of years old in one incarnation or another. I looked into a man’s eyes as he murdered me.
Eric Carter died about five years ago and took on the role of a god as part of a deal he . . . I? I can’t tell, anymore, struck with Mictecacihuatl, Santa Muerte, goddess of Mictlan.
Then somebody wanted Eric Carter back and performed a ritual to chip off a human-sized chunk of Mictlantecuhtli and dump it into a corpse.
I feel like I’m driving a badly abused but well-restored used car. A family heirloom, if you will. It’s my grandfather’s body. He’s one of the few people in my family tree who wasn’t cremated.
I’m a man, a god, my own grandfather. Who am I? What am I? It’s hard to deny my own humanity considering that I am, for all intents and purposes, human. But that’s just meat.
At the moment I’m some guy standing outside a small, five-story Art Deco building in the Downtown L.A. Broadway District wondering why I’m bothering doing people things: walking, breathing, existing.
The building’s been gutted and turned into lofts that’ll only set you back about fifteen thousand a month. Too close to Skid Row to be bougie, too close to Bunker Hill to be lowlife. Open plan, exposed pipes, beams, cement floor, walls that don’t meet the ceiling. It has its own parking lot on the first floor and a private elevator. Nice place if you can afford it.
I take the elevator up and get off on the penthouse floor. Door’s open. I let myself in. The décor’s different than you’d expect in a hipster hovel like this. Instead of paintings from some little art gallery in Silver Lake you’ve never heard of, the walls are covered in posters for a mage fighter named Fireball Freddy. A distant memory of the guy floats to the surface. Saw him fight once. Quite the asskicker.
It’s been a weird month since I’ve been back. Teasing out Eric Carter’s memories from Mictlantecuhtli’s. Considering Mictlantecuhtli spent the last five hundred years trapped in jade, you’d think it wouldn’t be that hard. Just pull out the last forty or so and you’re golden. But when all you can do is think, you do a lot of thinking.
Like, I have this irrational, to my mind, at least, hatred of the Spanish. The most I remember about Spain is a week I spent in Ibiza, and most of that is a drunken blur.
Mictlantecuhtli, however, saw his people enslaved and almost his entire pantheon wiped out. Those are clearly Mictlantecuhtli’s feelings. Still, I find myself feeling weirdly enraged anytime the subject comes up. Don’t even get me started on colonialism.
“Eric?” Letitia calls from one of the rooms.
All the Fireball Freddy memorabilia gives me an idea whose loft I’m in. I don’t know if Freddy ever fought at Quick Change Alice’s, though it’s a pretty good bet. A lot of good fighters cut their teeth in the Pit.
Freddy went professional and stayed at the top of his game for a good long while. He retired before he started losing. Living the rest of your life as an unbeatable legend is better than becoming an old man who got his ass kicked by some up-and-comer.
Being a pro, Freddy never killed anybody. Intentionally, at least. You really have to hold back. Even some amateur pit fights have that rule. Not Alice’s, of course.
It’s hard for a manager to build up somebody’s career if they’re just going to get ganked three fights in. You start murdering your opponents, you get dropped fast.
As I’m sure you can guess, Fireball Freddy’s signature move was the fireball. Turned them into an art form. He’d shoot these rapid fire, four-alarm nightmares that make the opening of Apocalypse Now look like a grease fire. Amazing he never cooked himself in the process.
But he sure as shit cooked his opponents. He didn’t kill, but if you went up against him it was a pretty good bet your career was over. He was big on disfiguring other fighters. Real bastard, that Freddy.
Folks knowing they might get their face melted off worked out pretty well for him. Guys would get in the ring and throw in the towel after he burned all the hair off the top of their heads.
So yeah, this is a nice place. With Letitia saying things were messy, I wasn’t really expecting a nice place.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I say, stepping into an equally nice bedroom with a walk-in closet, king-sized bed. The gutted corpse leaning against the corner wall, nailed upside down to a cross and wrapped in vines and duct tape is an interesting design choice.
“Bold statement,” I say. “Clashes a bit, but still makes it work. I’d love to talk to his decorator.”
He’s held in place with honest-to-god real thorn-covered vines. I didn’t think you could find them out here, but no, there they are. Wrapping around his forehead in a crown, around his waist as a belt, and around his ankles. I always use barbed wire myself. Easier to get hold of.
He’s been gutted from crotch to jaw, his insides pulled out, intestines hanging in front of his face like rope. From the way the blood is spread on the floor, bed, walls and ceiling, I’d say dude here was trussed up first and killed after. Big guy. Fully clothed. So he didn’t get hit in his sleep.
Funnily enough there’s blood spatter on the walls, which I would expect, but there are no gaps in it. No footprints, either. If a normal did this, they’d be soaked in the stuff. But that’s just an interesting detail. Simply the fact that somebody took this guy out tells me it was a mage.
If this is Fireball Freddy, likely, but hard to tell with his guts hanging in front of his face, he would not have been easy to take down in a fight. And if it is him, he never got a shot off with his signature move. There’s no charring on the wall.
“Yeah,” Letitia says. “We’re trying to get hold of them now. Dude, you look like hell.”
“I’m not sleeping great,” I say. Or at all. At least not for the last four days, or maybe it’s five. I’m running on caffeine, Adderall, and occasionally some cocaine just to mix it up.
Besides being a mage, Letitia’s an LAPD detective, but don’t hold that against her. It’s really more of a cover for what she spends most of her time doing. She’s part of a group called the Cleanup Crew. Sounds like what it is. They clean up magical shit to, hopefully, keep all the normals from realizing that there really is more to Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in their philosophy.
These days that’s a tall order. There’s a toxic fog of poisonous gas in South L.A. that hasn’t moved in over five years, for example, kept in place with magic so it doesn’t spread further and kill more people.
To say folks are suspicious is an understatement. But the Cleanup Crew does what it can with mage scientists and studies and conspiracy theories and a whole lot of feasible-sounding bullshit that nobody really buys, but nobody really knows how to explain otherwise, either. The Crew has been trying to figure out how to get rid of the fog without killing everyone left in Los Angeles ever since the god Quetzalcoatl blew up the industrial city of Vernon to send me a message.
“You doing all right?” she says.
“Peachy,” I say. “I don’t see any black-and-whites outside,” I say.
“This is Crew business,” she says. “At least for me it is.” She tilts her head toward the corner where I have totally missed a young blonde woman standing with her arms crossed and a grim face.
“For me it’s personal.” Amanda Werther. Letitia I was expecting. She’s the one who called me. Asked me to swing by to give her my professional opinion as a necromancer.
I know Amanda, but I don’t know much about her. We met last month under not-exactly-ideal circumstances. She’s the daughter of the man many think is the most powerful mage in Los Angeles. From what I hear she’s no slouch herself.
Pieces start connecting and though I don’t know why this has happened, I think I know why I’m here, and it’s not to give my professional opinion on necromancy.
“What exactly are you looking for from me?” I say.
“I wanted—” Letitia starts but Amanda cuts her off.
“Do you recognize him?” she blurts out. I can feel her drawing in power from the local pool of magic. Add that to what she’s probably already packing and somebody’s looking to be in a world of hurt. Possibly me.
I may not know Amanda well, but I do know she’s cool under fire. If she’s reacting like this, she’s off her game, which might sound like a ‘yeah, no shit,’ sort of observation, but any mage with her background has seen her share of dead bodies.
“Hard to say with his intestines in his face,” I say, ignoring her tapping the pool. I’m not sure she realizes she’s doing it. “But I’m guessing this is Fireball Freddy. Never met the guy. Saw him in New York once. Hell of a fighter. I don’t see any footprints in the blood so neither of you has actually gone over and looked, have you?”
“It’s pretty obvious how he died,” Amanda snaps. She is pissed.
“Yeah, but there’s a lot more than that going on here,” I say, turning to Letitia. “Kind of surprised you don’t have this one already zipped up.”
Mages kill each other all the time. We tend not to poke our heads into each other’s business unless it becomes a big enough issue for a large enough number of us. Otherwise the law of the land is pretty much whatever you can get away with.
“Tried to tell her, but she wanted to wait for you,” Letitia says. She doesn’t sound thrilled about it, and I can guess why. As the scion of the most powerful man in L.A., I’m thinking Amanda’s used to getting her way. Snapping out orders goes with the territory.
I gesture at the blood on the floor and the walls. “You got everything you need from all this?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Whatever you want to do, knock yourself out.”
“You might want to stand back,” I say. “I’ve been practicing, but this one’s kinda new.” This spell isn’t necromancy per se. Let’s call it necromancy-adjacent.
“Old dogs learning new tricks?” Letitia says.
“Give me a break,” I say. “I’ve only been alive for a month. Everything’s fucking new.”
