The Night Dahlia Page 8

  My last memory of the club was seeing a woman undulating to “Secret” by Oceanlab. She was swinging two glowing poi, one in each hand, and was wearing an oversized mask on her head, à la deadmau5, but this mask was of a cat. She nodded to me, and I gave her the sign of the horns.

  A warm, dry wind embraced my sweat-soaked body outside the club. There was a hint of the moisture of the sea, the slight tang of salt on my lips. Was I kissing Magdal … Kynthia … Kynthia, or was I kissing the sea?

  Her driver was taking us to her home, one of her homes. Time was flipping like still images on pages in a book, one after the other, speed giving the illusion of movement to frozen pictures. Through the tinted windows of the car, I watched the lights stream by us, like trails of burning, neon starlight. I watched the people walking the street, in the dregs of the night, morph and stretch, swell and diminish. I was a fractured mirror, and the light of the world moved through me, twisted and distorted by my flaws, my broken, jagged paths.

  I felt Kynthia’s hand slide between my legs; it pulled me back out of my broken shell and to the safe place of observing, of feeling nothing, remembering nothing but sensation. I grabbed her by the hair and pulled her to me, almost kissing her, but then looking into her eyes.

  “What are you going to do to me?” she whispered, fear and excitement wrestling behind her eyes.

  “You don’t know a goddamned thing about me,” the broken, flawed thing in me said to her. I clutched her hair tighter, and she hissed a little in pain but also in pleasure. “You have fucking everything you could ever want. People over on the mainland are starving, desperate, shooting poison into themselves to ignore the misery of their lives. Begging, waiting for death to end their suffering, and you actually court suffering.” She struggled to reach my lips, they were a breath apart. “You’re a spoiled, slumming dilettante, playing at pain, aren’t you? Answer me!” I growled. Her driver looked back; he looked confused and worried. I watched his eyes melt along with the dripping silver of the rearview mirror as the ketamine burned through my brain.

  “Madame?” the driver said. I was trying to figure out how he could speak with no face.

  “It’s … it’s all right, Barry,” Kynthia said. Her hand was working frantically below, tugging at the zipper of my jeans. “Please raise the partition.” Barry did as he was told, and shadowed glass slid between him and us. I saw our distorted faces in the glass; they didn’t sync up with our movements. “You don’t give a damn about those whining parasites,” Kynthia hissed to me; there was some anger darkening her eyes now too. She still struggled to reach my lips, and her hands were pulling me free of my jeans, frantically. “Just like you don’t give a damn about anyone but yourself, about what you want, how unfair life has been to you, you poor little criminal. You think you’re better than me? You’re just like me, except you can’t wash the stink of shit and poverty off you. You think that you’re some champion of the working class? You use them, just like you use everyone else. You’re a parasite, a fraud, a hustling fraud, you fucking peasant.”

  She saw she got what she wanted from me in her words. I felt cold cruelty settle over me and with it calm control and disciplined desire. This woman’s words were a mirror. “I’m glad,” I said as I slid my hand under her dress and between her parting thighs, “we understand each other.” I pulled her to my lips and she moaned, almost growled, trying to devour me as much as I was trying to encompass her—an ouroboros—consuming each other, fangs biting.

  I pulled her onto my lap, still leading her by her hair. She guided me, put me where she wanted me. I felt her heat, her need, envelop me; she arched, and I pulled her down. We both gasped at the union. She bit my shoulder as I pulled her breast free of her dress and teased her nipple with my teeth. There was no thought; there was action and reaction, risk and reward.

  Some gray time later, in her big bed, in her lovely, lonely house on this pretty island of make-believe, after many hours of rough games, of playing at master and servant, of passion, pleasure, and pain, we were making love again, slowly, almost sleepily. I looked into Kynthia’s eyes, down into the core of her. She was open and raw and vulnerable. She had given me every part of herself, but it had been for the most selfish of reasons. I understood that perfectly. There was no lying between us in this place, and that was a sort of magic too, far rarer than any alchemy or spell.

  “Who … who do you need me to be?” she asked. “Tell me, who do you want me to be?”

  “Magdalena,” I said. “Who do you want me to be?”

  “Kristos.” She said the name like a prayer.

  “Close your eyes,” I said. I kept mine open.

  That was the last time we made love before we both fell asleep. In a half-aware space, I thought I heard her sobbing. I didn’t try to reach for her, to hold her. I would have been no comfort at all, worse than no comfort.

  I awoke feeling like I had been in another fight. I had scratch marks and bruises all over me. Kynthia was gone. I wandered the empty house, silently, looked at photos on the walls of ghosts in people suits, and left.

  I made it back to the villa in the late afternoon. I found Vigil in a ratty Ohio State T-shirt and sweats sitting at the dining table with one of his pistols disassembled in front of him. He was running a metal rod with a small cleaning cloth attached to the end through the gun’s barrel. He didn’t even look up at me as I walked in.

  “Left or right?” he asked absently.

  “Between the ears, if you please,” I said. “I feel like someone emptied a dirty ashtray into my skull.”

  “So how was your … investigation?” he asked.

  “I got something,” I said.

  “Go see a doctor,” he said.

  “You’re a real card,” I said. “We’re headed for L.A.” Vigil looked up; he seemed a little impressed, but he hid it well.

  “Okay,” he said. “You can keep the kneecap. I’m not carrying your ass onto the plane.”

  SEVEN

  LAX was a madhouse on greased wheels, and one of the wheels wobbled the wrong way, like a bad shopping cart. People from all over the world landing in, and getting the hell out of, planet L.A. I began to feel the city’s energy, its rhythm, again about twenty minutes before final approach, as we began to pass over the outlying colonies and glittering arms of the great beast squatting at the edges of the desert and the sea. It had been a while since I had been here. I hadn’t called it home in almost thirty years. When business pulled me back to L.A. I always got out of town quick, before I ran into an old enemy, or worse, an old friend. As the years ground on, it got harder to keep the distinction straight.

  Ankou’s private jet landed, and we were escorted by more of the Fae crime boss’s soldiers, looking like models for the Vogue Yakuza spring fashion edition, to a shit-brown, nondescript-looking, late-model Dodge van with a couple of faded bumper stickers in Spanish and an ancient BABY ON BOARD yellow yield sticker on the hatchback window. It wasn’t exactly caviar in the back of a stretch limo, and that seemed weird for Ankou. All of the security detail were on their toes, acting like we were going to get jumped before we got out of the terminal. I looked over to Vigil and saw he had picked up on the vibe as well. He nodded to me and then accelerated a few steps to walk beside the security detail leader, an ex-military-looking fella.

  “What’s with all the amped security, Sergeant?” Vigil asked. Sarge kept walking, not even pausing to look at Vigil.

  “Nothing that need concern you, short-ear. Just keep walking and watch the wizard.” Vigil didn’t miss a beat. He stepped in front of the still-walking sergeant and drove the heel of his hand hard under his chin. Vigil’s other hand held the back of the man’s skull, shoving it forward into the strike. The security guy stopped and jerked back from the force of the strike, sputtering. The inside of his mouth was bloody. He blinked. Vigil had hit him so fast, even watching it made you doubt whether it had actually happened. Vigil’s hands were back at his side. He looked into Sarge’s watering
eyes with the same expression as before the exchange: calm, serene.

  “You know how to swear like you’re one of them, don’t you, you blunt-eared little primate? Do you know my title?” Sarge looked down and said nothing. “Answer me, flyspeck. You know that’s what they call you—blunt ears—when you’re not around, flyspeck? That’s all you’ll ever be to them; they blink and you’re dust. Don’t get no grand motherfucking notions that it ain’t so.”

  Sarge was sullen, and I saw the smoldering rage behind his runny eyes. After a moment, he muttered through bloodstained teeth, “Yes, Sir Burris.”

  “You and your detachment will address me by my title,” Vigil said, “or I’ll bathe in the watery blood of every single one of you, and Lord Ankou will give less than a damn if I do. We understand each other?”

  “Yes, Sir Burris.”

  “Good, now take us to our fucking ride,” Vigil said. And they did, hustling us into the old Dodge van like we were going to experience sniper fire at any moment. As we entered the van, I felt the web of protective spells and anti-scrying wards dripping off it. It was hard to miss the tripod-mounted, fifty-caliber machine gun in the hatchback section either, or the security man ready to use it, crouched like a door gunner in a tailored suit.

  Weaving through the concrete moats of I-405, I leaned over to Vigil and spoke softly. “So what is with all this?”

  “My best guess until I can have a proper sit-down with the sergeant is that one of Ankou’s rivals must have gotten wind of the operation. Probably looking to collect you to find out the particulars or kill you, to stop whatever it is.”

  “This is fucking stellar,” I said, slipping an American Spirit out and lighting it. “This is exactly why I don’t do the whole other-people thing.”

  “Uh, Mr. Ballard, no smoking, please,” the sergeant said. I ignored him.

  “I can’t drag a whole fucking security detail with me to the places I need to go,” I said. “They get one good look at them, or just you, and they are going to think ‘cop.’”

  “Mr. Ballard, no smoking in the car,” the sergeant said. “These windows are made of Chimera lens; they provide plenty of protection, but we can’t lower them, so…”

  I took a deep draw on the cigarette and blew some smoke the sergeant’s way. “Funny, I don’t hear Sir Burris saying anything about it. ’Course I am at a disadvantage with my tiny little blunt, human ears.” Vigil almost smiled, almost.

  “Man can smoke,” Vigil said.

  “Yes, Sir Burris.”

  * * *

  The Ankou clan had a modest little compound of three buildings and a dozen guest bungalows on twenty-seven acres in the hyper-exclusive, gated fortress community of North Beverly Park. You couldn’t swing a prenup without hitting a multimillionaire actor, musician, or pro athlete in the hood. The Ankous were also not the only high-profile drug dealers hiding out in Beverly Park from the majority of their customer base behind big, safe walls, patrolled by private police. We pulled up into the circular drive about forty minutes after getting clear of LAX. The drive featured a large, splashing, burbling fountain. I could sense a domesticated kelpie, a murderous water spirit, inhabiting the fountain’s waters, ready to strike and drown any unwary intruders to the grounds.

  The GQ goons took our stuff inside. When I walked into the foyer, I was suddenly reminded of Tony Montana’s mansion in Scarface. The world is fucking yours. I looked all over the place, and then I felt Vigil’s gaze on me. I turned to him and cranked my cornpone up to eleven.

  “Well, sha-zam! Where do y’all keep your fancy cement pond?” I said. Vigil shook his head and walked past me toward what looked like a study the size of a small Latin American country. I followed him. “Now what?” I asked.

  “Now, I check in with Ankou, and you tell me where we’re headed.” He pulled out a cell phone and slid into a thick leather chair.

  “Hold it, chief,” I said. “I wasn’t kidding in the car. I can find this girl’s trail, but I can’t do it with the goddamned Bulgarian police department hanging out with me.”

  “Just me,” he said. “I’ll be discreet. I’ll leave the strappado and thumbscrews at home.”

  “You can’t be this fucking discreet,” I said. “These folks are deep, deep background in the Life. They are skittish as hell, and they only talk or deal in front of people they are one hundred percent on.”

  “And that’s you?” Vigil said. I walked over to the full bar and rummaged around, finding a glass, some ice, and a bottle of Tanqueray and made myself a drink.

  “It is indeed,” I said.

  “I doubt you’ve been a hundred percent on anything in your whole life,” Vigil said. My response was to take a long, cool drink of the gin. Vigil dialed his phone, making sure the security encryption was active.

  “If you want results, you have got to do this my way,” I said. He held up a finger for me to pause.

  “It’s Burris,” he said into the cell. “We are on a semi-secure line. The asset has been delivered to Los Angeles…”

  “‘Asset,’ well, you sweet-talker, you,” I said, grinning.

  Vigil glared at me but continued, unabated. “If I may ask, which of your friends might we expect a visit from while we are here?” He listened for a bit and then made an even sourer face than usual. “Yes, I will give them your regards if our paths cross,” he finally said. “One more thing, the asset wishes to freelance his investigation.” Vigil paused as he listened to Ankou. “I see, yes. I agree. Very good. Yes, we will notify you of any progress. Good-bye.” He put the phone away and pulled himself out of the comfy chair.

  “The answer was no,” he said, “and I agree with his reasoning. Ankou’s agents have learned that House Xana has sent a Carnifex here to kill you.”

  “Xana, those are the Fae out of Spain, right?”

  “Yes,” Vigil said. “You know what a Carnifex is, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, they’re mystic hit men for the Fae Houses. Every family has a few on retainer.”

  “Then you know how dangerous they are,” Vigil said, “how much of their lives they devote to death and magic.”

  “Yeah.” I sighed and polished off the drink, poured another, and had it with an American Spirit chaser. “Look, I can handle a button man, even a skilled one. I’m not fresh off the turnip tru—”

  Vigil drew his gun fast, faster than he had punched Sarge on the airport tarmac. He fired as it cleared his holster. I was already rolling over the bar before my drink had hit the floor. I heard the whine of the round miss me by less than an inch and rip into the leather bar panels. I pulled the smoldering cigarette from between my clenched lips.

  “Ignis ceram audieritis me hostem feriunt,” I said, staring at the cigarette. A gout of flame roared from the instantly disintegrated cigarette and covered my hand. I visualized Vigil and the chair he was standing in front of and used my visualization like the sight on a gun. A streamer of flame shot over the bar and flashed toward the Elf.

  “Shit!” I heard him mutter, and then I heard the hiss as the bolt struck, the flame crackling hungrily as it devoured the leather chair. I made a gesture like tossing a ball from one hand to the other, and now both hands were wreathed in flame. I popped up, ready to shoot again. Vigil was on the floor on his stomach, in front of the blazing chair. Fire alarms were squealing all over the mansion. Vigil was holding his pistol in both hands. He had me, dead-bang, an easy shot to the head. The fire danced and frolicked between my hands.

  “Drop the spell,” he said.

  “You drop the gun,” I said.

  “I can kill you, easy, right now.”

  “And you can enjoy your brief victory with a barbecue,” I said. “I ain’t dropping shit.”

  A team of security men, some with guns, others with fire extinguishers, appeared at the archway to the room. Sarge was at the forefront. “Sir Burris?” he asked.

  Vigil didn’t take his eyes off me. “Well?” he asked.

  “After you,” I said. Vig
il lowered the gun and holstered it as he stood. I dismissed the working. The fire sputtered and was gone.

  “Put out the fire,” Vigil said to the detail. He walked over to me, he on one side of the bar, I on the other. “That was pretty good,” he said. “If I had waited for you to have a few more drinks, I’d have tagged you in the arm like I wanted to.”

  “But you were in too big a hurry to show me how right you were.” I looked over to the smoldering skeleton of the chair that the security detail had sprayed. “I’ve been handling magical hit men, monsters, and worse my whole life, on my own. I don’t need backup; I don’t need a fucking babysitter. I don’t need you.”

  “I have my orders,” Vigil said. “I’m not any more thrilled by them than you are. I figure from what I’ve heard of you, you stay alive because of dumb luck and letting everyone around you die so you can live. I have no intention of being your latest victim, but I have a duty and I plan to carry it out. I don’t give a damn what you think.”

  “Swell,” I said. “Well, let’s get this over with, then.”

  * * *

  We went to our rooms to freshen up before heading out. I sat on the edge of my circular bed, still damp from the shower, wrapped in a towel, and called Grinner on the Solarin smartphone.

  “Got anything?” I asked.

  “Ankou is a serious player,” Grinner said over the encrypted line. “Last couple of years, he fought a turf war with the Taliban over some key poppy real estate in Afghanistan and won. He’s cozy with the Russian mob and worming his way into controlling key choke points on the Silk Route, the northern distribution route for smack through Central Asia and the Russian Republic. That means the Triads are pissed at him and looking to cut the legs out of his business. His net worth is staggering, man, like GDP-fucking-staggering. Oh, and his enemies tend to just vanish. Keep this guy on your good side.”