“If this is about the night in the mansion, you were already dead when I shot you,” I say.

  “You sure about that?”

  I stop, turn toward him, look him up and down. “Yes,” I say. “I’m sure. I’m also sure you’re not a ghost, I’m pretty sure you’re not a nervous breakdown. I’m not entirely sure you’re you. So you want to tell me just what the fuck you are?”

  “How’s your shoulder doing?” he says. “Took a pretty nasty spill out there.”

  “It’s been better.”

  “Yeah? How about your chest? Hurts a lot, doesn’t it?”

  That stops me. The pain’s fading, but still there. It’s a cold, hollow feeling. “What about my chest?”

  He smiles at me. “You’re right,” he says. “I’m not a ghost. You’re going to want to make a left at that split in the hall, by the way.”

  “Don’t change the subject,” I say.

  “Stairs leading out,” he says, changing the subject anyway. “They’ll get you into an area of the Wilshire and Vermont station. You’re not supposed to be there, but that’s never stopped you before. Oh, and things are a little hectic there at the moment. You know, with a train full of dead people on it. Nice job with the bodies, by the way. That should keep people guessing for a good long while. What do you think they’ll say killed them? Toxic gas? Massive electrical short?”

  I bend down to move an office desk out of the way. “I’d chalk it up to terrorist attack,” I say. They’ll probably close the train down for a few weeks. The conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day.

  “Could be. Could be. You know it’s really too bad she got away.”

  “What do you mean?” I turn on him but he’s gone. There’s no flash of light, no pop in the air. He’s just there one second and gone the next.

  I spin around to see if he’s just fucking with me, extend my senses even though I know he’s no ghost. Whatever this guy is I’m pretty sure it’s not Alex. Maybe. It just doesn’t sound like him. That or death has turned him into a bigger dick than I remember.

  It takes me another twenty minutes to get to the end of the tunnel, and when I open the door onto the station it’s a zoo. I get caught up in the crush of people being herded out to the street. People are speculating about anthrax, a bomb, sarin gas like in that Tokyo subway. If they knew the real truth, they’d all shit bricks.

  For all the panic, people are surprisingly orderly. I can see that they’re afraid. Outside is a parking lot’s worth of cop cars, fire engines and ambulances. News choppers are starting to fill the sky. Paramedics stand around not sure what to do. Hope they brought a lot of body bags.

  I push my way through the crowd, hoping I can get out of there before anybody tries to ask me any questions. The name tag should keep most people out of my way, but if anyone in this crowd has even a little bit of talent they’ll spot me. I’m almost through to the edge of the throng when I catch it. A whiff of smoke, the overwhelming scent of roses.

  I glance over my shoulder and Santa Muerte is staring at me from inside the crowd, bare skull in a perpetual grin, white wedding dress shimmering in the afternoon sunlight. The crowd breaks in front of her as she sweeps her scythe, totally unaware of her presence. I could run, but what the hell would be the point? The new tattoo starts to burn, so I know it’s doing something, but the fact that she’s here tells me that it’s not doing enough.

  I freeze, don’t make a sound. She advances, inertia creeping inexorably toward me, and stops a few feet away from me. Facing the wrong direction.

  “Señora de las Sombras,” I say. She whips around to face me and though her eyes are empty pits I could swear it feels like she’s struggling to focus on me. Maybe this tattoo isn’t doing so bad after all.

  “Husband,” she says, her voice flat and neutral. I wince at the word. “You’re trying to hide from me.”

  “Doing a pretty piss poor job of it, apparently.”

  “Yes. Walk with me. Take my hand. We have things to discuss.”

  A few people, minor talents probably, glance at me talking to nothing. But in this age of Bluetooth headsets people talking to the air in front of them is nothing new.

  “The last time I took your hand I got a little more than I bargained for,” I say. “So you’ll excuse me if I decline. What do you want?”

  “I sensed you were in danger. I came to your aid.”

  “Kind of on the late side.”

  “I was … delayed. Whatever it is you’ve done has made it difficult to come to your aid.”

  “Yeah? What about last night? Didn’t think I was in danger then? No, I think you’re here because I went off your radar and it freaked you out.”

  She says nothing and I let the silence drag out. It occurs to me that a staring contest with an eyeless death goddess isn’t going to get me anywhere, so I turn my back on her and start to walk away.

  “Wait,” she says. “Please.”

  That stops me. Please? From her? I glance over my shoulder. “All right. What do you want?”

  “You are in danger. But I don’t know from what. Something interfered with my ability to see you last night. And earlier before I found you here.”

  That’s almost as disturbing as hearing her say “please.” “What could do that?” I say.

  It’s not the new tattoo. Aside from the fact that I didn’t have it last night, it’s pretty clear that it makes it hard for her to focus on me, but not impossible to track. I run my thumb over the wedding ring on my finger. I knew it was too much to hope for that it would actually hide me from her.

  “I don’t know. And that’s why I am, as you say, ‘freaked out.’”

  I don’t trust her, but I trust whoever’s blocking her connection to me even less. If the guy who took out Kettleman and the woman on the train have some way to block my connection to Santa Muerte I need to look into it. Carefully.

  “Good to know,” I say. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  “Be careful,” she says. “You’re no good to me dead.”

  “Noted, Señora.” I turn from her and start to push my way through the crowd.

  “Some of the dead were mine,” she says.

  “What?”

  “The people on the train who died. Some of them came to me. To Mictlan. They told me what happened. Who was that woman who tried to kill you?”

  “I don’t know. I—” I look around at the milling crowd. A few are starting to notice me. Here is not the place to start talking about dead people on the train. “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out. Thank you for your—” I search for the right word, come up short. “Concern. Now unless you want me to do something, you can go fuck off.” This time I keep pushing through the crowd and I don’t look back. The smell of smoke and roses fades a few moments later.

  Dammit. I had hoped that the new tattoo would get in the way of her finding me. But it seems something else is doing that for me. Could it be Alex? Could it be something about him that’s blocking me from her? For that matter, with the tattoo, how is he able to find me? The spell doesn’t include ghosts, but I’m still having trouble believing that he is one.

  I get a few blocks away from the station before stealing another car. Today’s ride is a gray Honda Accord. Most of the time I prefer cars that are a few years out of date, that don’t look too clean. Shabby doesn’t grab attention.

  Not long back I had a ’73 Cadillac Eldorado I got off another necromancer I threw down with in Texas. Steered like a mule, but it was a sweet ride. Two and a half tons of fine American steel. Lost it down in San Pedro when I drove it over to the land of the dead and couldn’t bring it back. Long story. I really miss that car.

  An hour later I’m back in Burbank, my body in agony. On the plus side I don’t have a broken nose and none of my ribs seem to be out of place, and the burning in my chest is gone. I’ll take bruises and a sprain to either of those any day.

  I strip down and check myself in the mirror. It’s always hard to tell where the bruises are amid all my ink, but the worst are easy enough to see. My shoulder is a massive welt of purple and black that spreads down past the scapula.

  I wash off in a shower with no water pressure, get the train grime off of me. When I’m done and toweled off I slap a pasty concoction of herbs onto whatever bruises I can reach. Arnica and eucalyptus, mostly, plus some stuff I got from an apothecary in Chinatown, all mixed in with Tiger Balm and a bottle of crushed-up aspirin. Between that and a couple Tylenol I should at least be functional.

  I flip on the television to see if there’s any more news about the subway. Seems every channel has something. The body count is thirty-two. Lots of speculation, no answers. More importantly no mention of me. I’m okay with that. Hopefully it’ll last.

  So what do I have so far? One guy wearing Kettleman’s skin, a crazy Russian chick with no sense of scale. So far as I can tell they’re different people, but when you can take somebody’s body by wearing their skin, I suppose anything’s possible. Alex’s appearance may or may not be a psychotic break. In other words, I have fuck-all.

  I lie back onto the bed, exhausted. I start to drift off when my other burner phone lets me know the spell in the train station didn’t fry its innards by buzzing on the nightstand. I grab it, half asleep.

  “Been calling you the last hour, man. What the hell?” MacFee says when I pick up.

  “Other phone got fried,” I say. Glad I grabbed the spare.

  “I don’t know anybody who’s as hard on their shit as you, man,” he says. “Anyway, she’ll talk to you,”

  A memory pokes through the fuzz of sleep but I’m not getting it. “Who’ll talk to me?”

  “The Bruja. She’s at some place called the Edgewood Arms in Skid Row.” He rattles off an address on San Pedro Street in Downtown L.A. Messy part of town. I make him repeat it twice to make sure I have it. Lots of gentrification, but no matter how many luxury lofts they try to develop or get cops to push the riffraff out, Skid Row is still a mecca for the homeless.

  “Wants to see you in an hour.”

  “Good for her. I’ll get there when I get there,” I say. Considering how well things went the last time I went on somebody else’s timetable, I’m not crazy about repeating the experience.

  “I’m just passing on the message,” he says. “Do with it what you like.”

  “I’ll check it out. She say anything about the knife when you talked to her?”

  “It’s more how she said it. She was awful excited on the phone.”

  “Like, too excited?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Good to know. Thanks.” Something’s been nagging at the back of my head since I talked to him this morning. “Hey, you said she’s got like a vampire army, or something?”

  “Fuck, I hope not. No, she just takes care of ’em. They’re worse than fuckin’ heroin addicts. She owns that hotel, gives them a place to stay. Like some kinda halfway house. I hear she’s got other stuff livin’ there, too, but I don’t know for certain.”

  “You ever meet her?”

  “Nope. Just her secretary. But I’ve talked to her. Old. Like fuckin’ ancient old. That or she smokes fifteen packs a day.”

  “Thanks. I’ll let you know how it goes.” I drop the line and start to get dressed. Dammit. What is it about her that I can’t remember? Whatever it is I hope it’s not important. And if it is, I hope I remember before it’s too late.

  The Edgewood is one of those aging single-resident occupancy hotels that sprang up through the first half of the last century in Downtown L.A. The Cecil, Alexandria, King Edward. Icons in their heyday, but gutted husks of former glory, now.

  Most have been torn down, redeveloped into office buildings, parking structures, luxury lofts. A few still work as hotels, but that’s stretching the definition. Section 8’s, drug addicts, people for whom the term “fixed income” means “crushing poverty.” They still get the occasional tourist, though some are better known for their serial killer residents. Ever heard the phrase “murder hotel”? This would be the place.

  I park the Honda in one of the ubiquitous public lots dotting Downtown just as the sun is setting and take a tour of the neighborhood. The block that the Edgewood Arms is on is surprisingly free of graffiti. Usually you’d see something from the rampant gangs that use Skid Row as an open-air drug market.

  But here there’s nothing. Streets and storefronts are shabby, but clean, new trees planted, no mini homeless camps of tarp-covered shopping carts shoved into alleyways. The few homeless I do see look like they’re either passing through or are actively on their way to do something, not just milling around drinking 40s out of paper bags.

  The weirdest thing is the lack of Dead. Skid Row is crawling with them. Homeless who spent one night too many outside in the winter, got shanked for a blanket, or just dropped dead from tuberculosis. Some of them go on their merry way, but a lot of them stick around, little balls of ghostly trauma lingering around the edges.

  But this block is empty. Just clearing a house of ghosts is a major undertaking, and to do it for an entire city block and make sure no new ghosts wander in? That’s the shit right there.

  The Edgewood Arms itself fits the same theme of shabby cleanliness as the rest of the block, like some alcoholic who’s come off a bender and gotten a shower and a shave. It needs work, but it’s solid. The marble entryway is pockmarked from years of neglect, the portico columns chipped and worn. But the floor has been swept and there’s a fresh coat of paint on everything.

  I circle the building a couple of times and the charms on the walls are pretty easy to pick out. Don’t-look-at-me spells inscribed on the walls tell the normals that there’s nothing to see here. Wards against a wide range of demons and monsters and a handful of curses that do god knows what tell the magic types to stay the fuck away. If you’re coming in through that front door, you better be loaded for bear.

  This isn’t a hotel, it’s a fucking fortress.

  I top off my tank from the local magic pool. I pull in power hard and fast and keep it coming until I can’t hold anymore. I don’t really need to, but any mages in the area are going to notice and it’ll make their ears perk up. The Bruja has shown me hers, the least I can do is show her mine. She ought to know that I’m not someone to fuck with either.

  I step through the doors into a carpeted foyer that continues the same, shabby theme. Old carpets, threadbare chairs, a massive hanging clock with a slowly ticking pendulum. The front desk is barred with an old Mexican guy reading a newspaper behind it. A half dozen Latino men, boys really, barely out of high school, sit in the chairs shooting the shit.

  The one person standing out from the rest is a young Latina woman with her hair pulled back in a ponytail sitting in the corner watching me like I’m a snake. Could be that secretary of the Bruja’s MacFee mentioned. Probably a mage herself and noticed the big drink I took outside.

  And then I see the door and it all clicks.

  It’s a fancy door. Red leather with brass buttons like you’d see leading to a bar in a Rat Pack movie. Big brass handle, heavy hinges. Only it doesn’t go anywhere. If this door opened it should open onto the street. Except there’s no door on the street side.

  That’s not the weird part.

  The weird part is that along the edges there are letters in Aramaic, script so thin and faded that if you’d never seen the letters before you might not catch them. They’re written on doors scattered all over L.A. Some of those doors move. Some stick around for a while. Most don’t actually look like doors. I know of one in Catalina, one in a bathroom stall in Union Station.

  There are other doors that don’t have that script. Doors that open onto places that, believe me, you don’t want to go. But these doors open onto a little pocket world stuffed inside a bottle buried somewhere in Los Angeles that’s been here ever since a Spanish explorer lost it while he was tromping through the New World. God help us if anybody digs that bottle up.

  I make a beeline toward the woman, ignore the stares from the boys and the guy behind the desk. She’s young, petite, wearing Doc Martens and a Sleigh Bells t-shirt. Early twenties. Chewing bubblegum.

  I’ve never met her, and I don’t know her name, but I’ve been told about her. At length. Anybody else would look at her and see a clichéd Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Cute, bubbly, maybe a little awkward.

  It’s all horseshit, of course. She runs this hotel as a home for wayward supernaturals. Vampires, mostly, but who knows what else. From what I’ve heard she’s quite the asskicker. Could tear a hole through this city it could fall through.

  Her face changes from wary attention to vapid smile as I get close. Disarming. Good strategy if I were just some no-nothing schlub. I stop in front of her. She looks up at me, blows a big, pink bubble of gum until it pops. The guys in the room stop talking, the testosterone stink coming off of them like they think their baby sister is being threatened.

  “They don’t even know, do they?” I say so only she can hear it.

  “And you’re not going to tell them,” she says back.

  I nod back toward the red leather door. “Darius speaks rather highly of you.” Wouldn’t shut up about her, in fact. Darius is the Djinn who lives behind that door. When I saw him some months back he was going on about some asskicker witch that had him all hot and bothered. I could be wrong that this is her, I suppose, but I know I’m not.

  “Really? He’s never mentioned you.”

  Not surprising. “We’re not exactly on speaking terms at the moment,” I say. “How’s he doing?”

  “As pet demons go, he’s not bad.”

  I can’t help but laugh, which I’m sure isn’t winning me any points. “Is that what he told you he is? Typical.” Probably said that to make her feel more in control. Mages know how to deal with demons. We know how to bend our will around them. But I don’t know anybody who knows how to handle the Djinn.

  “Look,” I say, “I don’t want to waste your time. You probably don’t give a rat’s ass about mine. So why don’t we go have a quiet chat someplace else without the entourage? Bruja.”

  She looks past me at the raging testosterone glaring holes in my back and waves them down. “All good,” she says. “Gonna take him upstairs to meet the Bruja.” She glares at me.

 

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