She sat.

  And went.

  She washed her hands and checked the missed calls on her phone. Carmen had called three times and not left messages. Dizzy didn’t call her back. Instead she ran the shower in hopes the heat would steam the gunk off her soul.

  This apartment wasn’t the one she’d shared with Lonnie. It was smaller and on the opposite end of the city. She lived on top of a bookstore in the set of rooms off an antechamber that acted as her office and foyer.

  Outside her window it was still midnight-dark. Remnants of the city’s nightlife crowd made their way from the side streets of pop-up black market shops and pocket bars toward the bodegas and noodle houses along the main road. The Thai carryout spot across the street was still popping beneath the turquoise neon of its sign. Blue light splashed the slick umbrellas passing beneath it and mingled with the head and tail-lights of folks headed home from third shift jobs. No one out for any other reason would be sober enough to drive at this hour.

  She cracked the window to let in fresh air and headed back to the shower.

  The ebony altar dusted in incense ashes and the iron ouroboros skeleton suspended before a bright sun tapestry on the wall behind it was hers. Apart from that and a locked cherry wood record cabinet containing those souls she’d stolen, most of the furniture had been Lonnie’s. She tried to forget that. But it was impossible sometimes not to see a phantom of her sleeping body coiled perfectly in their patterned sheets piled high like junihitoe layers in lieu of a real blanket. The system of cubed shelves on the far wall were still filled with her books. Their pictures together and posters of Lonnie’s movies were boxed up elsewhere.

  When she got in, the running water still reminded her of every time Lonnie insisted she sing to her from their kitchen to take her mind off the dialogue she obsessively rehearsed with the showerhead.

  Funny how I’ve stopped loving you...

  She caught herself humming and stopped. That had been some other shower. She’d sung to her from a much nicer kitchen. And it was all such a long time ago.

  She got out and dressed and braided down her wet hair before it dried itself into a chaos it’d be painful to sort later. The black card peeked out at her from the back pocket of Saturday’s jeans she’d discarded in a heap on the floor.

  When she met Tommy years ago, she’d been chasing down a lead in a jazz spot in South San Guin. Her mark made her and called Tommy—who worked in security at the time—to nab her in the alley while the mark made his escape. They fought. He was too big for her to kill easily. She was too quick. They left each other banged up and bloody, but alive.

  She knew this card was trouble. She knew she and Tommy were never destined to be friends. Still, she plucked it up and turned it over in her hands before chucking it onto the bedside table. Was it familiar? Or was she just hoping it was?

  She collected the accumulated food trash and deposited it in her tiny kitchen en route to her conference room (repurposed dining room) across the apartment. It was muggy behind the frosted glass doors that separated it from her office (a second-hand desk in her “living room”). She hadn’t bothered with the space in a year, maybe more, who could tell. It housed all of her investigative materials—the conspiracy wall with its pins and photos, the stacks of musty cardboard boxes containing less interesting records and evidence—surrounding the Fallen Angels Killer. Paper, she’d determined, could be saved. Anything the cops gave her digital access to could be manipulated or destroyed. And would be, if they were involved, which—judging by how unsolved the case remained—was still a distinct possibility.

  She scanned the items on the wall, looking for the symbol on the card. Drivers licenses, crime scene photos, maps, selfies, and webs of social circles. The killer terrorized San Guin over the course of an otherwise unremarkable summer. They’d dropped eight victims from the tops of things throughout the city, each with their tongues cut out and their mouths sewn shut, a move next-to-no-one knew rendered the victims catatonic in the dead world.

  Those of them who arrived.

  There had been eight victims in all. Lonnie was the last.

  Dizzy was numb by now to the grotesqueries of the victims’ smashed and distorted bodies, the unnatural splay of limbs popped from their joints beneath swollen, bruised skin. The pictures of their living faces for comparison still seemed to hold secrets. Had she been around to sever the threads that bound their lips shut, maybe their ghosts could have whispered a name.

  Nico mentioned demons, and that tracked. Most of the victims had fallen in places with no overhead structures. Too far into the middle of a road to have been thrown from high-rise windows like Kit Walker, or deep into the middle seats of an outdoor amphitheater like Nadege Colon. The killer would have had to be flying, but she’d checked with air traffic control. It wouldn’t be ridiculous to consider they’d had wings, but not even the Dracs had those.

  She found her gaze halted in the area of the wall bearing Nadege’s materials. Gallery owner, age 38, objectively gorgeous, towering, dark-skinned, well-heeled, not well-known, but on the rise in her own way at the time.

  Dizzy frowned. There was nothing on the wall with the symbol from the card, so she turned to the boxes on the table behind her to flick through the papers and photos she’d considered less than wall-worthy before. Buried within the stack was a candid photo used in a press release for the opening of her first gallery. Nadege was in a white suit, smiling and pointing at the camera, mid-sentence in a conversation with a beatific and apparently intrigued young man beside her. In her pointing hand, she held a glittering white clutch purse and what appeared to be the day’s mail. The angle wasn’t straight-on, but Dizzy could see now what was clearly the symbol from the card emblazoned on the outermost envelope. The edges of it were feathered and brown as if burned or branded, but it was the same.

  Her heart skipped. She slammed the photos onto the table and stalked back up the hallway to her bedroom closet. It was small and over-crowded with the things she couldn’t bother placing. Amid the vintage milk crates of even more vintage vinyl records was a crate bearing Lonnie’s paper things. Headshots, scripts, old mail, notebooks she’d collected more than used, to-do lists with things still undone.

  She snapped off the rubberband that bound the final three days of Lonnie’s mail together and was flipping rapidly through it when she made a sound, something like a yelp of both excitement and horror. A bill. A wedding invitation. And an open envelope with an odd wing insignia burned in its center. The envelope itself was empty.

  She’d never paid attention to the burnt envelope in the stack of Lonnie’s mail. It was only a flicker of a memory but she recalled the sensation of thumbing through the stack and barely registering the faint smell of burnt paper and thinking nothing of it. She’d been too excited for Lonnie to come home.

  This is it, she thought, her hands trembling as she traced the symbol with her fingers. Well, not it, but it was something. Some mystery that tied Lonnie to at least one of the other victims. Maybe all of them. The longer she stared at the symbol, the more it appeared to be a shattered bird…or a broken body.

  This was something.

  She hadn’t killed Tommy that night in the alley because she thought he was just doing his job. She could hardly fathom all the ways he would suffer if it turned out he had anything to do with what happened to Lonnie.

  First thing’s first, however. Her boot laces slapped at the baseboards as she stomped back to her conference room. She snapped a picture of the photo of Nadege and her friend and had her phone begin the work of identifying and potentially locating them. It pinged by the time she snatched her keys and gun from her bedroom.

  Emmanuelle Tiva.

  “Of the Tiva-Tivas, of course.” She sighed, reading the screen. “Fuck.”

  Manny here was a Drac; descended of some really, really old world vampires in the natural, somebody-gave-birth-to-them kind of way and not the formerly-mortal-and-thus-inherently-possessed-of-an-exploitable-weakness kind of way.

  “Well, good day to die I guess.” Dizzy shook her head. She grabbed a set of brass knuckles with silver-tipped spikes from her bedside drawer, just in case. Silver bullets were fucking expensive.

  four

  Dracs were considered royalty not out of any concept of material wealth, but in that they were the apex predator in whichever environment they desired to place themselves. Individually, they could be unassuming, but they lived in nests, surrounded by their own, and had a fungal sort of quality where the right tonal screech at the unhinging of their humanoid jaws could summon the entirety of their kin, from the most affluent to the most gutter-bound, all to descend upon an enemy. And they did not play about family.

  Emmanuelle Tiva lived in a middling district—or at least his grandmother did. Dizzy tracked him from the wealthy center-city high rises he’d lived in back when Nadege was alive, to these perfectly quaint stucco townhomes along the western edge of San Guin.

  Not even the dead milled about here. It was a curious thing to feel alone because of it. Still, she knew she was being watched when she knocked on the oxblood door of 661 Box Street. These were dinner hours but there were no food smells on the street. And though it was getting late, the HP&L street lamps here remained off. The one light she could see was just a flicker some blocks away. It told her how deep into the nest she was.

  Her phone vibrated in her back pocket. Carmen. Dizzy sighed. Her thumb vacillated between the screen options to answer or hang up. She’d missed half a dozen calls from her already. She stowed it again without choosing when the door opened.

  A young man—Latine, twenties, middling height, a bit bored in the eyes—stood before her. The air that rushed past him was definitely marked by death, along with spices and a little smoke. He didn’t speak, but studied her.

  “I’m looking for Emmanuelle Tiva,” Dizzy offered.

  The man frowned, nose twitching at the air around her. “What are you?”

  “Me? I’m an investigator. Not of Emmanuelle, they didn’t do anything. I’m here about Nadege Colon. I understand they were friends.”

  He said nothing for a few tense moments and Dizzy tried discreetly glancing over his shoulder to make sense of the dark behind him.

  When he stepped aside, the path revealed not the interior of a home, but a dark alleyway. Dizzy hesitated to step inside, wondering if she’d been all that convincing, if Nadege’s name was truly enough to ensure she was being welcomed in peace and not for dinner. Inevitably she steeled herself, shoving her hands into her jacket pockets and nodded by way of thanks before stepping past him.

  It took time for her eyes to adjust once the door was closed behind her. But they were still outside. The roofline overhead ended abruptly and there was sky and only the fuzzy light the moon provided. The Drac probably didn’t need much in the way of light. The man looked back as if signaling for her to follow, a sheen marking his dark eyes like a cat’s in the night. The walls were lined with what seemed to be apartment doors and there were sounds of people living lives behind them. He rapped his knuckles casually on two of them as they passed, someone emerging from each to walk behind her until she was flanked. Dizzy swallowed hard but kept her pace. This didn’t seem the place to exhibit fear.

  The alleyway let out into a courtyard lit by a scant number of eerie green lamps and whatever the moon provided. The apartments extended upward two additional floors and surrounded the square. Roots of a giant tree raised the paving stones surrounding it. There was a small garden, a dry fountain, and a few scattered stone tables bookended by mismatched dining room chairs. The doorman pulled one of these into a clearing where Dizzy could be watched and pointed for her to sit in it.

  She obliged and he disappeared, leaving the other two guards behind her. She tried not to find the interminable number of doors disorienting as people stepped out to lean over railings and observe her. There would be no getting out of here if she needed it. She regretted not answering when Carmen called.

  Someone’s great-grandmother approached from behind her, escorted by the doorman. She was short, maybe 5’2”, wrinkled and hunched, long fingers clutching the top of a walking staff that clicked violently on the pavers. The state of the silver bun at her crown indicated she’d put it there that morning and hadn’t bothered with its slow unraveling since.

  Undoubtedly the matriarch.

  She stood at Dizzy’s side, examining her. Dizzy was unsure whether standing out of respect would be received as a threat. She remained seated.

  “I am Maia, Emmanuelle’s grandmother,” said the woman.

  “Desdemona Carter.”

  “What are you?”

  “I told your doorman, I’m an investigator.”

  “No.” Maia leaned forward and took a long, predatory inhale. “What are you?”

  “I’m…human. A deadwalker.” She hoped that was clear enough. Dizzy’s business was with dead humans. The undead had nothing to fear from her. She hoped that meant a default to mutual respect.

  “Hm,” Maia grunted, unimpressed. “A drunk deadwalker. Bad for blood, you know. Smells like poison. The taste, though… eh.” She trailed off into a chuckle that suggested she didn’t mind it so much.

  Dizzy cleared her throat. “Right, well, Emmanuelle was friends with this woman, Nadege Colon.” She showed Maia the picture on her phone. “She was the fourth victim of a serial killer seven years ago. My wife was the eighth. If Emmanuelle can help me find who killed our girls, I would be incredibly grateful. It’s the first lead I’ve had in years.”

  “Manny talked to the cops already,” Maia said, unblinking.

  “Well, since when has that helped anyone?” Dizzy shrugged.

  Maia did not move for a long time. And then she signaled almost imperceptibly, and in Dizzy’s periphery a number of people moved. One came to draw out a chair in front of Dizzy and help Maia to sit in it. Two more disappeared behind a set of doors on a wall near the courtyard entrance.

  “You know it’s bold of you to come here,” Maia told her with an incandescent toothy grin. Her hands bore down on the engraved walking stick between her legs as her assistant cut and lit a cigar for her. Dizzy noted the old woman’s tattooed knuckles and more ink peeking above the collar of her housecoat.

  “I do. I appreciate your time,” Dizzy replied.

  Maia’s expression turned somber as she exhaled an impossible cloud of thick pumpkin-tinged smoke. “When she died, it destroyed my Manny. You will see. They were the very best friends.”

  A trio of people emerged from the courtyard doors; two helpers and an emaciated Emmanuelle between them stepped into the dim light of the space. Maia’s helper placed a chair beside her and Maia, pat the seat of it to invite Emmanuelle to sit. They did sit, but stared into some middle space between the three of them. Dizzy found their face gaunt, the skin of it almost deathly pale and robbed of its rich goldenness from the photo. It made their eyes seem overlarge beneath the dark curls pouring around their face.

  “Manny, this girl, she is helping find Nadgie’s killer,” Maia said.

  At the mention of Nadege’s name, Emmanuelle finally looked at Dizzy as if discovering her there for the first time. They looked like they’d been crying for ages and could pick it up again at any moment.

  “I’m Dizzy Carter, Emmanuelle. I didn’t know Nadege, but my wife was one of her killer’s victims. I found this picture in the investigative notes. This symbol—” she enlarged the picture on her phone to examine the symbol on the envelope, “—matches this letter I found in Lonnie’s mail. Do you know where Nadege got this letter? Who sent it?”

  Manny seemed to ignore the letter and took Dizzy’s phone to focus on Nadege’s face in the picture. Their lip quivered and a haunting sort of wail began in their throat. It shook the air and Dizzy felt the fine hairs of her arms raise as figures on the balconies and edges of the square began to agitate. Maia covered Emmanuelle’s hands with her own and growled lightly, stilling the activity around them. She then gently returned Dizzy’s phone to her.

  “Do you know the letter?” Maia asked them again.

  Dizzy held up Lonnie’s letter in case it helped.

  Manny blinked repeatedly and inhaled a long time. “She was so excited,” they whispered. “That day, that letter…we had just opened the gallery and she found a new artist. That letter…some grant or philanthropist, some investor. I don’t know. I didn’t know it would matter so I didn’t…save it, I didn’t remember…”

  “Shhh…” Maia hushed them as their words began to tumble and roll together. “Okay. Okay,” she soothed.

  “You know, I found her.” Manny snarled suddenly, their eyes boring into Dizzy. “I saw what they did. I can’t stop seeing it.”

  “I know,” Dizzy told them. “I found Lonnie.”

  “So then you know.” Manny’s voice broke. They leaned forward, reaching for Dizzy’s hand. Maybe they’d never met a victim’s loved one before. Maybe they never knew someone else knew this torture. “How could they do that to something…to someone so beautiful?”

  Their intensity was increasing. Dizzy could feel her hand being crushed before Maia pulled them back.

  “What else do you need?” Maia insisted, smoke billowing.

  “Do you remember meeting any investors? Any suspicious strangers? Anyone with an infatuation maybe with Nadege?”

  “No, no, no!” Manny was becoming increasingly distressed. . “I told you! I didn’t know it would matter so I didn’t keep it! I didn’t keep the memories! I want them back I swear to you but I can’t find them!”

  Maia signaled her helpers again. “We lost Manny for some years to the scene, you know. To these drugs. It’s why we bring them here away from the city. My baby wanted to lose memories then. They were only able to lose the wrong ones.” She ashed the remainder of her spent cigar and pointed back at Dizzy. “You know that life, no?”

 

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