City of the Lost (26 page)

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Authors: Stephen Blackmoore

BOOK: City of the Lost
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She shoves the barrels under her chin and pulls the trigger.
Chapter 27
The blast is deafening.
Her body jerks as the bullet blows through the top of her head. Everything above her nose shatters like a birthday piñata, streamers of blood showering the ceiling.
I run to her. I grab her as she collapses. Blood pumping from a heart that hasn’t figured out its job is over.
Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I know this is temporary. I know she’ll be fine, and that this is only a quick escape route. But I’m holding her, shaking her, yelling at her just the same. She was right, I realize; I couldn’t have hurt her.
Hadn’t realized how much she could hurt me, though.
A groan behind me pulls me back to the real world. The guard twitches, eyes fluttering. I don’t give him the chance to wake up. I kick him in the head to keep him out. I can only hope he’s as professional as Samantha thinks. I don’t want Santa Monica’s finest looking for me.
I can hear the cops’ footsteps on the stairs, see the elevator’s slow crawl upward.
I run to a back window overlooking the alley below. This isn’t such a bad idea. Right? Maybe it won’t suck as much as I think it will. Besides, it’s not like I’ve never jumped out a window before. Just not from eight stories up.
Cops are kicking the door in. I heave myself out of the window, get a second to regret doing it before I clip the roof of a Volvo. Both legs shatter. I bounce off it, scraping my face across the pavement. Bone crunches, skin shreds. I drag myself behind a Dumpster, wait a moment for my legs to rearrange themselves enough that I can hobble off.
I give Samantha’s apartment one final look. Wonder if I’ll see her again. And what will happen when I do.
“You all right?” Gabriela leans against the hotel room doorway looking in at me. She’s got hangover eyes, the slouch of the terminally exhausted.
“Me? Darius said you were gonna be out all night.”
She waves the idea away. “What does he know?” she says. “He’s just a demon. And you’re avoiding the question.”
I’ve showered, changed into a leftover set of clothes from one of her vampires.
Gabriela must be feeling sorry for me. I’m on my second cigarette, and she hasn’t tried to put it out.
“Meh. I’m okay. Mostly just feeling stupid.”
I fill her in on what happened at Samantha’s. She makes the appropriate sympathetic noises at the right moments. She’s good. Power aside, I can see why people flock to her.
“You trusted her, didn’t you?” she asks.
“Doesn’t happen often. Don’t think it’ll happen again anytime soon.”
“Trust isn’t so bad, you know. I trusted you. You came through for me.”
“Hey, you’re still my best bet in all this. Besides, you’d have been fine.”
She crosses the threshold, sits next to me on the bed. “No, I wouldn’t have. You gave me an anchor. Something to come back to. Land of the dead’s not a fun place to get stuck.”
She says to the guy with no pulse.
“Wasn’t me bringing you back.”
She pauses a moment, a word on her lips. Whatever it was, she changes her mind. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right,” she says. She slaps my thigh, stands up. “But enough of this emo bullshit. We need to find that rock.”
“I’m out of ideas. My only lead’s leaking in the back of a morgue wagon right about now. I appreciate all this, really, but the rock’s gone. Pretty soon Giavetti’s going to do his thing, and it’ll all be over. I’ll be out of your hair. Better I just go find a hole to wait it out in.”
I’ve been thinking about packing it in since I got back. Really, what’s the point? Giavetti uses that thing, and I’m going to flake away like government cheese.
“Jesus, you’re a pussy,” she says. “You’re this goddamn close, and you want to give up?”
“You know where Giavetti’s at? I’m tapped. Better he just use the damn thing. Solve all my problems. This point, I just want it over.”
“I don’t know where he is, but I know someone who does.”
I don’t know why we didn’t think of this sooner. Probably because neither one of us wanted to pay the price.
“I’m beginning to think it’s time to renegotiate,” Darius says, wiping down the bar with a cloth. I’m still not clear on whether any of this is real, but the drinks are good, so I guess it doesn’t really matter.
“Oh come on,” Gabriela says. “We’ve got a contract.”
“That either one of us can break at any time,” he says. He flexes his enormous shoulders. “And I’m feelin’ a mite cooped up of late.”
“I don’t know why we’re doing this,” I say. “We’ve been over this before. He can’t find the rock. Even if he could, he can’t tell us where it is.”
“Don’t go presupposing for me, Dead Man,” Darius says. “I know things you can’t even imagine.”
“Yeah, and it means fuck all to me right now. Do you know where it is or not?” According to Gabriela, since Samantha died the spell keeping the stone hidden should have dissolved with her. Even when she comes back, anything that she’s done should still be gone. So now Darius should be able to pinpoint it.
“Of course, I do. But that’s privileged information. We’re not betting on the ponies, here. You want the whereabouts of the stone, it’s going to require a special price.”
“What is it?” Gabriela asks.
“I want a night with you, sweet thing,” he says. He chucks her gently on the chin. His smile is all teeth.
Gabriela, already a little pasty faced, goes a shade whiter. “What about the rest of our contract?” she asks. “If you’re renegotiating here, is that your new asking price for everything?”
He thinks a moment. “No. Same terms for the rest.”
“Not to break up a budding romance,” I say, “but there’s still the problem of actually telling us.”
“Oh, like you didn’t figure it out the last time. I’ll just make it easier on ya.” He puts up three fingers. “Scout’s promise.”
Gabriela seems to be seriously considering it. “Deal,” she says finally, putting out her hand. “When my next question is about the location of the rock, and you answer it, you have me for one night. Nothing rough. Nothing painful. All other questions are covered by the same terms.”
“Whoa. I don’t think so,” I say. Gabriela puts her other hand up to stop me.
“Not your decision,” Darius says. I swear he’s drooling.
“Do we have a deal, then?”
Darius’ hand swallows hers, and he pumps it like he’s pulling water from a well. There’s a sound just beyond my hearing. Like a pop, only not. Like a sound a sound makes when it’s not there.
“Don’t worry,” he says to me with a wink, “I’ll be gentle. Now, ask away.”
“Where is Giavetti holding his ritual?” Gabriela says.
Darius blinks at her.
“You bitch,” he says, though there’s an admiring tone in his voice.
“Okay, what just happened?” I ask.
“Never said I wanted to know where the stone was,” she says. “My next question wasn’t about the stone. And he has to follow the rules. So give. Where is he?”
He lets loose with a belly laugh that shakes the room. “See,” he says to me, “this is why I like her. Reminds me of a girl I knew in Persia way back when.”
He clears his throat, cracks his neck. His eyes roll back in his head. Really making a show of it. “He’s in the junkyard,” he says, his voice a carny fortune-teller’s.
“Junkyard?” Gabriela asks. “What junkyard?”
“Mackay Salvage,” I say. Jesus. Samantha really went to town on this one. Got Giavetti the stone, got him the book, even got him a place to fuck himself in. “It’s close. Next to the river.” I give her a rundown on the place, how I found it.
“Okay,” she says. “So we head over and—” The room shudders like it’s been hit by a city bus.
My guts twist with it, and fire shoots down my arms. Pain’s something I’d got used to not feeling, and the sudden shock of it sends me to my knees. It passes with the same sudden shock it came with.
“The hell was that?”
“Brownout,” she says, helping me stand. “He’s started.”
“Brownout?”
“The stone’s tapping into the local reservoirs,” Darius says. He’s not looking too comfortable with all this. “Drawing power. A lot of it. You have to go. Now.”
I’m getting that same sinking feeling I’ve gotten when I’m starting to rot. Only I don’t have the same hunger. I look at my hands. They’re starting to sink in on themselves. Going gray. Dark blotches are fading up through the skin.
The bar shudders again, and that blast of pain staggers me. Gabriela pulls me hard toward the door.
Darius is sweating. “Another shake up like that and I’m not sure I can keep my door open,” Darius says. He’s got a calm veneer, but something in his voice has me worried.
“This place isn’t a place,” Gabriela says to my questioning look. She’s shoving me along, and I’m having trouble keeping up. “It exists independent of the local pool, but the door doesn’t. He draws on that power to keep it open to the hotel. The power drops too much, and the door to the hotel shuts. Then we’re stuck.”
“And if it goes away completely?” My voice is cracked and hoarse, like it’s got holes in it.
“The bar disappears,” Darius says. “Oh, it’s still here, but it won’t look like this. The surroundings won’t be quite so . . . pleasant.”
“What about you?” I ask him.
“I’ll be fine. This place is all for your benefit, not mine. Go on. Git.”
The bar patrons, figments of Darius’ overactive imagination, start to snap out of existence. A dancer goes. Then another. Then whole swaths of them. The music disappears instrument by instrument as phantom jazz musicians disintegrate on stage. It’s like watching popcorn in reverse. The walls shimmer, get indistinct.
We run to the door. Halfway there my left leg goes numb. I drag it the rest of the way. Gabriela yanks the door open. The hotel lobby’s on the other side, but it’s flickering like a bad print of a Chaplin film.
“Fuck,” she says.
“That’s bad?”
“Very.” You can almost smell the gears turning in her head, weighing odds, looking for options. A weird calm settles over her.
“If I go through when it flickers out,” she says, “I won’t be coming through alive.” The flickering is getting worse, the dark spaces noticeably longer.
“We’re stuck?” A flake of skin drifts lazily off my forehead to the floor.
“We’s too many people,” she says. “You’re already dead.”
“No. You’re not staying here. You can’t. There’s got to be another way out of here. Darius said—”
“Darius is oversimplifying. No, it won’t be pleasant, but it won’t kill me to be here when the lights go out.”
“Do you know that for sure? What happens when this place goes dark?”
She looks back at Darius. He’s washing shot glasses. Whistling to himself. Trying to be calm. He’s not fooling anyone. The glasses pop out of existence as soon as he puts them down.
“No,” she says. “But I do know that I’ll die if I go through now.” She’s trying hard to maintain, but I can see the fear in her eyes.
“If I get Giavetti before all the power’s gone—”
“Then the bar, the door, all of it, should come back. Hopefully, I’ll come back with it.”
“I’ll stop him. I’ll get you out of here.”
“I know. I’d kiss you for good luck, but you’re going a little green.”
“That happens.”
“I won’t hold it against you. Now go. Before I kick you through.”
There’s no way to time it, so I just step through. There’s a roar in my ears, a sense of cold and hot at the same time. My vision goes black.
When I can see again, I’m through. My clothes are smoking a little. The hotel lobby’s just as it was. I turn back to the door.
But it’s already gone.
Chapter 28
Driving to the junkyard is a challenge.
I’m going fast. Faster than before. The skin on my hands has split, spilling thick blood across the steering wheel. The tendons in my left ankle snap halfway there, and I have to shift gears with a flopping foot that might as well be a stump.

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