Ghost Money, page 21
She follows me out of the car and into yet another burnt-out building. This one’s nothing but blackened sticks, the stink of char still lingering in the air. I pull a small silver dish out of my messenger bag, my straight razor, and a Maglite.
“What are we doing?” Indigo says.
“Talking to some people who might give us a direction. If we’re lucky, some of them will have enough brains to answer some questions.”
I can still feel the ghosts of Skid Row around me. A lot of them are hiding, sliding between the gaps in my perception. I can feel them, but I can’t see them yet. They’re laying low, like spooked fish when a shark’s around. The street is pitch dark. The streetlamps are all still out, and the surrounding buildings are all abandoned. I need some light.
I flick on the flashlight, its spotlight-strong beam slicing through the dark. “Hold that and point here.” I give her the flashlight and put my left forearm into the light.
“Should we be lighting things up?” she says.
“I’m not worried about it. There’s nobody on the streets, and if Fan is nearby he’s not gonna be here. The bigger tears in reality and the greatest number of ghosts are a few blocks down. And I would like to see what I’m doing so I don’t accidentally slash my wrist and bleed to death on you. That would be embarrassing.”
“Can I just go on record and say necromancy is fucked up?”
“Not gonna get any arguments from me.” I cut into my forearm and the blood wells up. I let a few drops hit the silver dish, pump a little magic into it, and call out to the restless dead.
“Hey. Soup’s on. Who’s hungry?”
A handful of Wanderers emerge into view in front of me. None of them look like any of the ones I saw last time I was down here.
“Are they here?” Indigo says.
“Yeah,” I pull a Band-Aid out of my pocket and put it over the cut. This one’s got superheroes all over it. If you’re gonna bleed for the dead, no reason you can’t be whimsical about it. “You can shut off the light. They give off enough of their own.”
“I think I’ll keep it on,” she says. “I’m a little creeped out right now.”
“Suit yourself. All right, listen up. I need to know if anybody’s seen an Asian guy, looks like an undertaker, trying to yank you lot over to our side. Anybody?” They all stare at the dish, mesmerized. I snap my fingers in front of them and a couple look at me.
“I did,” one of them says. “I’d seen him before. He tried to get us to cross over to his side last week. Said we could eat our fills. But he couldn’t do it.”
“Yeah, I know about that. How about more recently?”
“Yesterday,” the ghost says. “I think. I can’t see the sun here. Why can’t I see the sun?”
“Because you’re dead.”
“Oh. What did you say?”
“Have you seen this guy more recently? Chinese. Undertaker-looking guy.”
“Yesterday. He was able to do it that time.”
“And that would be . . .”
“Taking us. I don’t know how many he took, a hundred? They screamed. Like they were being torn apart.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” I say.
“What doesn’t sound good?” Indigo says. “I’m only getting half of this conversation.”
“Fan was here the other day and yanked about a hundred ghosts over. Hey, how did he look afterward?”
“Who are you talking to?” the ghost says.
“Nobody you need to worry about. Focus. What did this guy look like after he pulled all the ghosts across?”
“Sick,” it says. “Tired. Then he left.”
“Did he have anything with him? A jar, a box, a bunch of money, anything?”
“He had the dead with him.”
“Yeah, I got that. But in what? Did he shove them in a suitcase?”
“He took them inside him,” the ghost says. “Can I eat now?”
Okay, that’s probably not good. I wonder if that’s how he’s been trapping the ghosts in the first place. If so, he’s crazier than I thought. Or this might be the first time he’s done it, in which case he’s stupider than I thought. I’ve taken half that many at one time and it nearly killed me. I can’t imagine what that would do to someone who isn’t a necromancer.
“Sure,” I say. “It’s all yours.” The ghost descends on it like a starving bobcat on a deer carcass. Indigo jumps back a little as the dish bounces and rattles as the ghost laps up the life in the blood.
Once the ghost has pulled whatever meager life it can from those few drops of my blood, I pick up the dish and wipe it out with a handkerchief.
“What the hell was that?” Indigo says.
“You want something from a ghost, you have to bribe it. I just gave it a snack. It eats life. What you saw was as much of a crossover from the other side to this side as we should be able to get. When I call them, the dish and the blood exist on both sides for a bit. Doesn’t need to be a dish. Black rams work surprisingly well.”
“It can feed on the blood in a dead animal?”
“Oh, no. Animal’s still alive.”
“What would that do to a person?” Indigo says.
“Nothing you really want me to tell you. You said it, necromancy’s fucked up.”
“Fuck. Are we done?”
“Yeah.” I’m not sure if things are better or worse than I thought. If the ghost’s sense of time is right, would Fan have been here before or after the house in the hills? And why did he do it? That can’t be how he’d made the other ghost bombs.
We head back to the car. I take a yellow two-way radio off the dashboard and click the talk button a few times to get everybody’s attention.
“I have Indigo,” I say.
Used to be that if something happened Downtown, Gabriela was the first one to know about it. As the Bruja she was the word on the street. She was the go-to mage everybody wanted to do business with. Somebody farted in City Hall, she’d know about it.
“Copy,” Letitia says.
“Roger,” I say back.
“You don’t say roger,” she says. “You say copy.”
“Why?”
“Nobody cares, Eric,” Gabriela says. “Hi Indigo, I’m Gabriela. Glad to have you with us. Sorry you’re in the clown car.”
“Uh . . . thanks?” Indigo says. I hit the talk button.
“Indigo says thanks. We made a pit stop so I could talk to some ghosts.” I tell them what the ghost told me.
“Is that bad?” Letitia says. “Won’t they eat him?”
“Not if he did it the way I think he did,” I say. “He might be batshit crazy and think he’s a hundred different people all at once, but it probably won’t kill him. Not for a while, at least.”
“Great,” Letitia says. “Now everybody shut up.” I toss the radio back on top of the dashboard.
“So what now? We’re looking for lights?” Indigo says.
We’re driving slowly down San Pedro with the headlights off. Not only would they tell people we’re coming, but they’d fuck any night vision we might have. There are only a couple of streetlights working, and it’s almost as dark as it was on Third. Like the one where we stopped, all of the buildings we pass are either derelict or dark.
“Or if you feel any magic, but yeah, lights. Clusters of cars, a big gaggle of rough-looking gentlemen standing outside a conveniently lit-up warehouse with a sign that says ‘Bad Guys Inside.’ You know, the usual.”
“And when we find them?”
“Improvise violently and with little to no regard for property damage.”
“I can get behind that. So tell me more about this guy.”
“A mage who learned a few necromancer tricks and improvised a couple of his own. His boss is dead now and we figure he’s going to want to make more of those ghost bombs as soon as possible.”
“I’m gonna kill him,” she says. “In case you were thinking of anything like taking him alive.”
“Do I look like a ‘taking them alive’ kinda guy? Reduce him to a chunky pink paste with my blessing.”
The radio clicks on. It’s one of Gabriela’s people. “Think I got it,” a woman says. “Sixth and San Pedro. Big building. Burnt all to shit, but there are lights on one side of the top floor.”
“I see it,” Gabriela says. “And feel it. Something’s going on in there.”
I grab the radio and answer. “We’ll be there in a minute,” I say and gun the engine.
Chapter 23
Gunshots in the distance. I can see Letitia’s car and the flash of gunfire and spells coming from the top floor of the building. They couldn’t have waited a goddamn minute?
“Let me out here,” Indigo says when we’re a block away. She’s loading a shotgun, one of the Benelli M4 tacticals I had in the back seat with her. Between that and the Desert Eagle she should be able to take care of herself pretty well.
“What, you gonna fly up the side of the building?” I say, and pull over. She gets out and slings a bandolier of shells over her shoulder.
“Ha. No. I’m gonna run up it.”
“You never told me what your knack is,” I say.
“You never asked.” She turns to the building and bolts. I can feel the magic as she picks up speed. Then, with a sensation like ears popping, the magic reaches some crucial point and then she’s up the side of the building. Goddamn, she must go through a lot of shoes.
“Where the fuck are you?” Letitia’s voice over the radio. “We’re getting hammered over here!”
I don’t bother answering. I gun the engine and head down San Pedro. Some of the gunfire is coming from the building’s lobby now. I can see three guys with submachine guns blazing away at the car. I can see Letitia’s got a shield up, and Gabriela is hunkered down putting something, a bandage maybe, on her left arm.
I aim the Honda for the gunfire in the lobby. As I hit the curb I throw on the high beams and hit the horn. I slam into the gunmen doing about fifty. The Honda crashes into the far wall, crumpling the front end and setting off the airbags. I black out for a second.
Right. I’m not supposed to do shit like this anymore.
I get out of the car as Letitia and Gabriela run up to me. The guys who were shooting at them are under the front of the Honda, at the end of thick smears of gore.
“Where’s Indigo?” Letitia says.
“She went up without us,” I say. “She runs. Really fast. And she has a shotgun. And a sweet Desert Eagle.”
“We need to get up there,” Gabriela says. “How are you doing?”
“A little woozy. How about you?” She’s got a quick clot bandage wrapped around her left bicep.
“A little woozy. How do we get up?”
“It’s ten stories,” Letitia says. “We’re going to walk into a bullet hose if we try the stairs.”
“Hang on.” I dig through my messenger bag until I find Peter’s ring. “Either of you seen one of these before? Pretty sure it’s supposed to make portals. I have no idea how to use it.”
“I’ve seen ones like it,” Gabriela says. “If it’s like most of them, you put it on, think about where you want to go, and tell it to open a hole.”
“All right,” I say, sliding the ring over my finger. “Let’s give it a whirl.”
It works. A space opens up in the wall in front of us that looks out onto the top floor of the building. Fan’s men are shooting wildly at something just out of sight. Either they can’t see us or they haven’t noticed us. I pull the Browning and put three of them down, while Letitia takes two, before the rest of them realize there’s someone on their flank.
I close the portal with a thought and open up another one somewhere else on the top floor. Gunfire around the corner. Indigo zipping back and forth. I yell for her and she glances over and runs to us.
“Neat trick,” she says.
“Yeah, it’s kinda nifty. How are you doing?”
“I don’t think they like me,” she says, reloading the Benelli. They’re still firing, not realizing that she’s ducked around the corner. That’s not going to last very long.
“You’re in good company,” Gabriela says. “They don’t like us, either.”
“How about we all go be unlikable at them together?” I say and step through the portal. Gabriela follows, and Letitia looks at it a little nervously, like she expects it to snap closed and cut her in half, before hopping through.
This is a pretty potent little trinket. Makes me wonder what else I could use it for. It also makes me wonder why Darius gave it to Peter in the first place.
“How do you want to work this?” Indigo says. I look to Letitia. She’s got more experience with this sort of thing than I do.
“Call in a SWAT team?” she says. “This isn’t exactly my area of expertise.”
“Jesus, you people,” Gabriela says, and strides toward the corner. They’ve stopped firing. I can hear reloading and a few tentative steps from behind cover.
Gabriela puts her hand on the wall and closes her eyes. At the touch, a ripple goes through walls and floors like they’re water. A loud ripping and crashing noise, like a jet engine and a woodchipper having a shredding contest, comes from around the corner. Water bursts from pipes, sparks explode from the shattered fluorescent lights, throwing the entire floor into darkness. Screams. Gunfire. Silence.
I give it a few seconds then peek around the corner. I cast a light spell over the remains of the hallway and let it float downward, revealing a path of destruction going five stories down. The entire hallway from one end to the other and down through half the building is missing. A pile of debris and bodies lies at the bottom.
“Tell me we don’t have to go down that hall to find Fan?” I say.
“Back the way you came,” Indigo says. “There’s an office and I think it passes around through to the other side. Are we sure this is the right place?”
“Fuck, I hope so. Why?”
“I can’t feel any magic,” she says. “If he’s killing people to power his spells, we should be able to feel him drawing the power out of them, or at the very least whatever spell he’s working on.”
She’s right. I can’t feel anything happening. And then I can, but it’s not magic. I trigger the ring for the lobby and push all three of them through it while yelling at them to get the hell out of there.
I snap the portal closed and turn just as the first of the feral ghosts comes screaming around the corner.
* * *
—
The first time I remember seeing a ghost, I was seven years old. My power had already manifested and, like how you lock up every scrap of food when you have a puppy you can’t trust not to counter surf and eat it all, my family had to take precautions to make sure nothing died in the house. Because it would never stay dead, or at least unanimated, for very long.
Later, when I had more control, if something did die, like the few times cats would go under our porch and keel over, I’d prop them up and march them down the street and let them fall over there. It was like trash that took out itself. But I hadn’t seen ghosts, yet. I was vaguely aware of them, had the feeling there were more people around, that I was never really alone.
My parents didn’t really know what to expect of a kid who can see the dead. When my invisible friends started telling me things like how they were murdered, it kind of threw them for a loop.
They couldn’t find another necromancer to apprentice me to, so all they could do was teach me how to use magic as best they could and hope I didn’t get myself killed using spells they couldn’t even understand.
But that first ghost. That thing terrified me. I was at the park with my dad on a swing set, trying to blend in with all the normal kids. And all of a sudden this guy with half his face ground down like he just spent an hour on a belt sander appears in front of me and starts screaming.
So, of course, I start screaming, and not knowing what the hell is going on, my dad starts screaming. So now there’s me, my dad, and a dead guy with the worst case of road rash ever, all screaming at each other. I probably peed myself or something, but I did something else then, too.
I killed it.
That’s how I saw it at the time, killing it. Before I knew what ghosts were and how they worked. It was instinct. It scared me, so I sort of grabbed it with my mind and squeezed until it popped. And then I wasn’t afraid of ghosts anymore. I kept not being afraid until I had to face a dozen of them on the other side of the veil and they were trying to kill me.
And then I was terrified all over again. Kind of like now.
There are ten of them, and I can feel more manifesting nearby. I wonder if Fan isn’t even bothering to trap them, just wedging a hole open and letting them through.
These are like the others, feral, nothing left of them but hunger and rage. They’ve been stripped of so much that I don’t know if I could really call them ghosts.
The first two I squeeze until they explode, and the two after that I eat. They go down like lemon juice and razor blades and it takes everything I have to not fall over puking again.
The other six are right behind them, and I get my shield up and around myself just as they get to me. They slam against it, scratching and screaming. I can’t keep this up forever. My shield’s going to crack eventually. And there are more ghosts coming behind them.
I need something I can use as a spirit jar. Something big enough to hold them all, like back at the Montecito Heights house. I don’t think a trash can’s going to do it this time. Or even a dumpster.
How many ghosts can you fit into a single spirit jar? Like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It’d be an interesting philosophical question if I wasn’t about to get eaten.
The few times I’ve been in a situation where a fuck-ton of ghosts are on my ass I’ve either had to make a run for it, which has gotten me tagged enough times that there are still places on my body I just can’t feel, or I’ve been lucky enough to have somebody conveniently nearby I can throw at them to eat instead.
