The Night Dahlia Read online

  I found Caern’s neighborhood and parked the bike across the street. Her building was whitewashed with a trim of bright blue. There was a tasteful, wrought-iron fence around the building’s grounds that included a courtyard with a few plastic beach chairs and a little round table under a stand of palm trees. There was an electronic lock next to the gate that required a tenant’s key card to open. I placed my hand on the box and whispered as I let the charge of power flow from my Manipura chakra, “Apertus.” The gate clicked open, and I walked through.

  Caern’s condo was up a short flight of stairs. She had the left side of the building, and someone else lived on the right. The first floor was about a half-dozen smaller apartments. The ward hit me in the face walking down the hall to her door. Fae magic was formidable, but it was so fucking ostentatious, it practically shouted at you. It was like they had to bling the hell out of even the simplest lock and alarm spell. I felt around the edges of the working and then snipped and silenced it with a few words.

  I stepped inside Caern Ankou’s life and closed the door behind me. The air conditioner hummed, set to keep the place comfortable for no one. The place looked more like a hotel than a teenage girl’s home. Nice, cream-colored furniture, muted tones, a rug with no stains from Cheetos crunched underfoot or spilled Cokes. I frowned and walked the spacious rooms. They were silent to me, silent to even my Ajna chakra. There were no traces of any significant emotional imprints on this place. Caern may have slept here, eaten here, watched TV here, but she hadn’t lived here, in any meaningful way. I found that very sad. Children, teens, usually smear the air with angry, brilliant colors of emotion and experience. I expected a teenage fairy princess to leave me a trail like a bunch of My Little Ponies had puked all over the place, fucking rainbows and glitter. But this … it told me a lot about her by how little it told.

  I sat down at the edge of her perfectly made bed. I wanted to smoke, but it felt like I was in a museum or something. I’m sure Sir Vigil would be giving me that look, the one I had already seen enough to call it “that look,” if I lit up an American Spirit in here.

  There was not even a faint charge of sexual energy from the bed, the bedroom. If she’d had raging hormones like most teenagers, she kept them in check like a Trappist monk, at least at this address. Some of this began to make some sense. Daddy set all this up and obliviously paid the bills here. This would be the last place on Earth you’d get any sense of the real girl. I started opening cabinets and rummaging through things as a last, feeble attempt to find anything I could use, or track. I’m sure every gumshoe and private dick before me had done the same.

  I found a half-full bag of cat litter, two empty bowls, and some cat toys under the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink, next to the household cleaners, folded paper grocery bags, and packages of yellow rubber gloves. I knelt down and found a few cans of wet cat food specially formulated for kittens near the back of the cabinet. During my rummaging and scrounging, I found something else. It was faint, faded from age and distance, I’d imagine, but there was a trace of some of Caern’s Anahata, her heart energy, here. The energy was drifting lazily around the toys, appearing like tiny green fizzy soda bubbles to my perception. She had loved this cat, loved it so much that it still showed years later.

  A bit more hunting, and I was able to find a tuft of gray cat fur in the cabinet. I could work with this. I found plastic sandwich bags neatly stored in one of the kitchen drawers, and I carefully placed the fur in one bag and a few of the frayed feathers from the end of a much-abused cat toy in another bag. I sealed them, folded them up, and tucked them in the pocket of my jeans. I also took a small, pink, gnawed-on rubber mouse. I squeezed it, and it squeaked. I stuffed the mouse toy in my pocket too.

  I left everything as I had found it, and then switched off the lights on my way out. Waiting for me across the street from the condo, leaning against the red Ducati Desmosedici, was Burris, with his arms crossed, giving me “that look.” He stood as I crossed the street toward him and the Streetfighter.

  “You know, young man, speed kills,” I said. “You’re lucky to be ali—” I didn’t get to finish my smart-ass remark. Vigil drove a jab into my jaw and followed it up a beat later with a half-knuckle strike to my solar plexus. I fell back onto my ass and couldn’t breathe and sure as hell couldn’t incant any snappy magical Latin retorts. He took a step toward me and as fluidly as water runs, drew a handgun from a holster located at the small of his back and thumbed back the trigger with a click.

  “You ever try that shit again,” he said calmly, “and I will put a bullet in your fucking kneecap. You don’t need a kneecap to be a drunken piece of shit has-been, still pretending to be a legend.”

  “Fair … enough,” I wheezed, as my breath came back to me. He slowly lowered the hammer on the gun, holstered it with one hand, and offered me the other hand to help me up off the street. I took it, and as I rose, and he pulled, I drove a nasty sucker-punch into the side of his face. He staggered back, his lip split, just like mine. We were matchies now.

  “That’s fair enough too,” I said and spit some blood into the cleanest gutter I had ever seen. I pulled my forearms in and kept them up, like my old boxing coach had screamed at me about a million times, and shuffled back. Vigil rubbed his jaw and lip, examined his blood, rubbed it between his fingers and thumb, and then looked up at me.

  “You throw a pretty good hook for an old, white drunk,” he said. “What finishing school of the mystic arts you learn that at?”

  “Million Dollar Boxing Gym,” I said, “Hull Street, Richmond, Virginia. The Hogwarts Pugilism Society wouldn’t take me ’cause the sorting hat said I was with House Huffle-Puff-Puff-Pass. You?”

  “Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati,” he said. “Finals were a bitch.”

  A Greek cop on a Vespa slowed and looked at the two of us facing off on the sidewalk. He was a cop for the tourists, in a short-sleeved, light blue, button-down shirt with epaulets, dark blue pants, and a cap. For the genteel folk of Spetses, he seemed to have left his riot gear and truncheon at home tonight. He looked more like an airline pilot than a cop, and he was smiling, which was weird. He flashed the beam of a Maglite over us and asked something in Greek. I got the gist of it, which was the polite these-guys-may-be-richer-than-Bill-Gates version of “What the fuck are you two skells doing here?”

  Vigil did the talking, keeping his gun out of view. He offered his identification to the cop, and I heard the name “Ankou” tossed out liberally. The cop nodded, still smiling and seeming to apologize. He waved to us and putt-putted away on his little scooter.

  “This shit is just surreal,” I said. Vigil, standing next to me, nodded.

  “You never get used to it if you didn’t grow up in it,” he said. “Different world for these people, different cops, different laws. We’ll always be tourists, hired help.”

  “You want to get something to eat?” I asked.

  “Cool,” Vigil said. “Chasing a moron on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar bike down a hill without a perfectly good road, in the dark, always makes me hungry.” We both began to climb onto our bikes. Vigil picked up his helmet and adjusted its straps. “I wasn’t fooling about the kneecap,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I kinda got that. How the hell did you shake off the working like that?”

  “Oh, I felt it,” he said, “but it didn’t take. I’m half Fae, on my pop’s side, whoever the fuck he was. A lot of magic just doesn’t stick to me too well. Comes in handy when dealing with low-life, sucker-punching wizard types.”

  “You’re an Elf,” I said. Vigil paused from pulling his helmet over his head and locked eyes with me. He knew that I knew what being an Elf meant in his world.

  “You have a problem with that,” he said. It wasn’t a question, it was a challenge.

  “Nah,” I said. “Mind if I call you ‘Dobby’?”

  “Mind if I beat all the red out of your neck?” His bike roared to life.

  “I’ll take that as a no,�
�� I said and started the Streetfighter up. We pulled away from the curb in search of burgers and beers.

  FIVE

  I woke up around ten and prepared everything I needed for the ritual, pulling items from my old canvas bag. Vigil was up already, of course, out on the deck overlooking the fantastic view of the sea. He was doing tai chi in nothing but a pair of old, torn sweatpants. He paused after a moment when he sensed me watching him.

  “I’m going to start the working,” I said. “So leave me the fuck alone.”

  “This is already turning into a good day,” he said and turned back to the ocean. “Remember, kneecap.” He settled into his form again, and I flipped him off and walked back inside.

  I found an exercise room with a treadmill, some free weights, a rack with big exercise balls, and a wall of mirrors. It was perfect for what I needed. I dropped all the goodies I’d need on the floor, moved the equipment to a far corner of the room, shut the door, and locked it.

  I set up a small circle of squat, partially melted silver candles in front of the wall of mirrors. At the center of the circle, I placed a small, ancient, and weathered statue of a cat, made of onyx and gold. I drew a chalk circle on the industrial carpet exactly three feet south from the circle of candles. I drew symbols above the circle for the opening of the Ma’at, and below the circle was the hieroglyphic name of the being I was entreating. I placed the tuft of cat fur, the feathers from the cat toy, and the small rubber mouse in the smaller circle, and then I lit the candles of the larger circle. I turned off the fluorescent overhead lights. The room was dark except for the light from the candles, reflected, jumping, in the mirrored wall.

  I sat cross-legged exactly seven feet away from the circle of candles and four feet from the chalk circle. I spent a few moments clearing my mind and regulating my breathing. I aligned my energies and felt the silence and shadow of the room begin to congeal. Time stuttered. Silently, I began the prayers, venerable and precise, filled with formula and geometry that defined the undefinable, named it, gave shape and dimension where none existed, called out to something primordial in the deepest recesses of the endless wheel of the Ma’at.

  الحكمة كما ليلة ،

  الصمت كما ليلة ،

  حارس الأسرار ،

  العارف القلوب ،

  أم ل أعنف موجة من قلوب ،

  اللحاء ، كين للقطط ،

  ساق معي الآن ،

  مطاردة معي الآن ،

  يؤدي بي إلى بلدي فريسة ،

  ل مجدك ،

  ل مجدك ،

  تشغيل يلة معي.

  قادني الى المجد.

  The prayer was a silent song in my mind; I continued it and hoped one of the most capricious of goddesses would oblige me with her wisdom.

  It took a while, I knew it would, but I began to feel her silent approach through the tangled forest of the mind. I opened my eyes and saw in the reflection of the mirrored wall a shadow, deeper than the darkness of the room, pad gracefully toward the circle of candles. Her eyes were blazing amber, alien, and devoid of any emotion or motive I would ever understand. She regarded the ritual and me through the reflection, searching for any reason, any flaw to allow her to pounce and devour me. Luckily for me, she found none.

  The Mother of Cats didn’t deign to speak in human tongue; it was too demeaning for her. She snatched the thoughts from my head as easily as flashing out a paw to catch a mouse. She sifted my thoughts like streams of flowing sand and considered my request and my offerings. After a moment, the shadow with eyes of amber fire shifted, seeming to silently spill over to my side of the mirror. It devoured everything in the small chalk circle, and then, as it retreated to the other side of the mirror, it snuffed the ring of candles out. The room fell to darkness. I felt the goddess’s presence striding away, tail swishing. I heard two squeaks of the rubber mouse. This window to the Ma’at closed and she was gone.

  I stood, switched on the harsh overhead lights, and blinked. The chalk circle was empty save for a tiny silver bell, like you might find on a cat’s collar. I picked it up and began to hear a tiny jingle in my mind. As I walked toward the door to the room, the frequency of the jingle increased. She had accepted my offerings and given me what I had asked for.

  I grabbed a shower, changed into black, button-down jeans and boots. I walked past Vigil’s room and heard his shower going as well. No sense in interrupting. I told one of the house servants downstairs to tell him where I was going before I left. I had a spare kneecap.

  I decided to take the bright blue Lamborghini Aventador today. It was a convertible, of course. Halfway down the mountain toward the city, the little bell’s silvery tinkle in my head was getting faster and faster. I realized I was really hungry, having skipped breakfast to amuse a cat goddess. The car’s stereo was playing “Endless Sleeper” by the Raveonettes, loud.

  I had the buzz that came from digging up a strong lead, being back on the hunt, one step closer to getting the answer. People have asked me my whole life why the fuck I get mixed up in shit like this. The simple answer is that it distracts me from my own sorry train wreck. Getting up in other people’s business keeps me occupied and out of my own damn skull. So, no noble aspirations here. I’m no hero—far the fuck from it. Just good old-fashioned self-interest. I keep hoping I’ll run into some sorry son of a bitch one day more fucked up than me, or at least as badass, to boost my obviously flagging self-esteem and feed my passive-aggressive death wish. To date, no credible challengers.

  It took a little over an hour of Tinker Bell in my skull to narrow the search once I hit the city. The ever-increasing ringing led me to a small cluster of waterside apartments and finally to the door of one on the third floor. These places were not as nice, nor as expensive and exclusive as where Caern had lived. The neighborhood and the dwellings made me figure its tenants were mostly townies, the locals who did all the real work around here, to keep the idle rich, well, idle.

  No magic spells or locks on the door to apartment 3E. It opened easily enough with a simple working, and I was in. I snapped on the lights and saw, as well as felt, that this was a real home, a place someone had invested some of the energy of living into.

  Clothes were scattered over several pieces of furniture. There was an abandoned ring of jeans with panties coiled inside them about three feet from the door, like someone had come home from a rough day and shucked off their clothes right there. Takeout food boxes and cartons littered the coffee table beside a plastic, transparent, rainbow-colored bong; a baggie with weed; and about a dozen empty, or half-empty, diet soda and beer cans. Wandering the small, four-room apartment, there were emotions—love, excitement, sadness, anger, desire, self-doubt—splashed about the air like someone had opened big cans of bright paint and spattered them about randomly.

  There was an insistent yowl, and a little gray-and-white cat padded out from the debris. Her paws were much bigger than the rest of her. Her eyes were the color of a stormy sky. She looked at me, and I looked at her. The bell in my skull silenced. This was the cat that had been in Caern’s condo. I knelt down to pet her, and she bolted back to her hiding place. I had a way with women.

  For a second, I had thought it was going to be this easy, that Caern had changed her name and had been living the normal life of a twentysomething within spitting distance of her old life, but checking through the piles of mail stacked up on the small table by the door dissuaded me of that premise. This girl, Dree Elias, had bills and was behind on several. She had a job and benefits statements from her employer, including several past-due notices on a loan against her 401(k). These kinds of things were chum to any serious hacker or investigator, the kind of bread crumbs that they could track from life A to life B. If Dree Elias had been Caern Ankou, I would never have been summoned by her dad.

  A few pictures were framed about the place—most people her age had ditched the notion of paper photos fo
r digital memories. Most of the pictures were family: Mom, Dad, and maybe Grandma. A few of a pretty girl about the right age for either Dree or Caern with brown hair and green eyes, snuggling the cat that had greeted me. One pic of the same girl with maybe a boyfriend on the white sand of one of the beaches.

  I was figuring Dree as a friend of Caern’s, maybe, or maybe she had picked up Caern’s cat at a shelter, or she was just an acquaintance that took the cat in. Doubtful. This skittish little furball was loved. That love was the only connecting tissue between my lost princess and this girl. That didn’t feel like a coincidence. From the bathroom, I removed a clump of hair from a hairbrush and tucked it away in case I needed it.

  From the mail and an ID badge with a lanyard hung on a key hook near the door, I was able to get the address of where Dree worked, at the local branch of Alpha Bank, one of the massive European banking corporations. I opened a tin of cat food and left it by the cat’s bowls. She was immediately out again and noisily letting me know she wanted the food. I gave her a quick rub, which she allowed, because she was already devouring the food from the can. I locked the door on my way out.

  * * *

  The Spetses island branch of Alpha Bank was a two-story building that blended well with the quaint cafes and shops it was nestled alongside in the cove of Ntapia Beach. I found a small place a few doors down and had some fresh seafood and several frosted mugs of beer at a table under an awning, looking out over the waters. I worked on a quick arts-and-crafts project with my linen napkin and Dree’s hair from her brush. When it was done, I pocketed it and finished my beer before strolling over to the bank.

  I walked into the cool, shaded lobby and saw the girl from the photographs and the ID, Dree, with her long, brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was dressed in a cream blouse and dark blue pants. She had a lanyard about her neck, like the spare she had at home. Dree gave me a once-over as I walked in, so did the security guard, a balding older gentleman who did not look as good in his trousers as Dree did. She smiled at me, and I returned the favor.