Nightwise (12 page)

“Yeah, dude has trained himself to reach a heightened state of creative visualization while on LSD. He's a seventh-brain adept, a neurogentic alchemist. He works his magic with a computer while he's tripping his balls off,” Grinner said.

“I know what an Acidmancer is,” I said. “I just didn't think they existed anymore. They were Timothy Leary's Knights of the Round Table. There were eight of them, hand-picked, one for each of the Eight Circuits of Consciousness Leary discovered. I just thought they all died in San Francisco, fighting Charles Manson's nightmare Tulpas in the Helter Skelter War in 1969.”

“Well, Bruce is no poser,” Grinner said. “He should be able to tell you everything about your boy there.”

I stood and slung my bags on my back. I offered a hand to Grinner. “Thanks, Grinner, I 'preciate it.”

He shook my hand and nodded down toward the bedroom hallway. “Anything you want me to tell her?”

“Tell her to get to Didgeri as soon as she can. She can protect Magdalena, or at least hide her if there is any blowback from me. You guys will make sure she's okay before you cut out, right?”

“Yeah, man. Christine loves her; we'll make sure she's okay. But do you want me to say anything to her, y'know, from you?”

“No,” I said. “I fucked this up enough already.”

“Classy as always, Ballard,” Grinner said. “Oh, yeah, Didgeri texted me this morning. She said to meet a guy named Trace at Café Sage down on John Street. She said he'd be there about one thirty today. He'll be gone by two.”

“Okay,” I said. “See you around, Grinner. Kiss your girl for me, and that baby too.”

“Affirmative,” he said, opening the front door. “May the road rise to meet you, and may the doorknob not hit you where Mother Nature split you.”

I walked out. Homeless, again.

“Hey, asshole,” Grinner said. I looked back.

“Christine loves you too. Surprise me, don't go do something stupid. Be safe, bro.”

*   *   *

I ditched my bags in my reserved locker back at the Port Authority bus station. Dropped off stuff that might cause trouble and hung on to a few tricks that might help. I ditched my ID and pocketed the last of my cash, then took a cab to John Street.

I wanted to eat a pound of greasy Cajun fried chicken, wash it down with an ice-cold two-liter of Cheerwine, which was nowhere to be found in this god-forsaken town, and then sleep and sober up, but I was running out of time and I knew it. In a very short period of time, no hotel, no flop, no crack-house fortress would be safe for me to stay at for more than a few hours. The All-Seeing Eye, well, sees all. I needed leverage to stay alive long enough to find Slorzack, and to keep breathing even after I found him.

Café Sage is a cozy little Thai restaurant, a few blocks from the Federal Reserve building. The walls were painted with vibrant colors—yellow, red, and green plants reaching to a happy orange sky. The lightness of the place was stark compared to the cold, rainy gray day outside. I walked in and shook off the rain. There were only a handful of people in the café. None of them looked like faceless occult assassins, so I chalked that up as a win. The lunch rush had ended, and the staff was catching their breath, a few of them eating at a table near the doors to the kitchen. Crowded House's “Don't Dream It's Over” was playing on the stereo behind the bar.

A handsome young Asian man in a crisp white shirt and flowered tie greeted me at the door with a smile. You could cut yourself on the pleats of his slacks. I told him I was meeting someone, and he nodded and pointed to a table near the windows occupied by an equally handsome black man, who looked to be in his early thirties. He was dressed in a perfectly tailored suit, Valentino, I'd guess. His trench coat hung over the back of his chair, drying. As I approached, he began to give me the look usually reserved for dismissing street bums, then the lights went on, and he rose and extended his well-manicured hand.

“Mr. Ballard? I'm Alex Trace. I was told you could help me.”

“Depends,” I said, sitting and turning to the waiter. “You have Cheerwine? It's a soda?” He smiled and shook his head. “Of course you don't. Thai ice tea.” I regarded Trace as the waiter departed. “I might be able to help you if you help me. Tell me everything there is to tell about James Berman and Dusan Slorzack.”

He picked up his coffee, his hands trembling. “I'm with … was with James since 2000. I was twenty-one, he was thirty. He'd just become a senior partner at his firm; I was finishing up my internship and starting my job at the Fed. James was into … strange things. He fascinated me. He … had a wife and children. They don't know him, not really. They know the mask he had to wear to move through the maze. But I got the real him, all the ugliness, the beauty, the secrets, the lies. I'm the caretaker of the true James Berman.”

“You're scared,” I said, thanking the waiter for my tea. I took a long drag on it. It was cool and sweet, and my head cleared a little. “They come asking after they found him?”

“Yes,” Trace said. “The police, a few days ago. I have no idea how they knew about me. James was always very discreet.”

I took the handcuff keys out of my pocket and held them up for Trace to see. His eyes widened, then he began to tear up. He looked down into his coffee. “Very,” I said.

“We explored every aspect of the senses,” he said. “James had such a high-pressure job, so much responsibility, so much weight on him from above and below. Sometimes he needed to feel in absolute control of everything. I was his everything. Sometimes he needed that control stripped away from him, so he could feel helpless and have permission to feel that way. I couldn't give him that; it's not in my nature, but … others did,” Trace said, wiping his eyes.

“Look,” I said, handing the handcuff keys to him. He clutched them in his fist like they were solid faith. “I'm sorry for your loss, but Berm … James was messed up in some very bad stuff with some very bad people, and I am trying to find one of them. It's quite possible James is dead now because of this man.”

“The Bosnian,” Trace said. “Slorzack. The Pain Eater.”

“Yep,” I said. “You've obviously met.”

“That creepy son of a bitch,” Trace said, and crossed himself. I smiled.

“You a religious man?” I said.

“I haven't stepped into a church in fifteen years,” he said. “When it comes to the Prince of Darkness, yes. That bastard scared the hell out of me, and James too.”

“I heard they were tight?” I said.

“If by ‘tight,' you mean Slorzack used and manipulated James to get what he wanted, then yes,” Trace said, sipping his coffee. His fear seemed to be losing out to his anger. “Topping, evil bitch. James worshiped him. Kissed his ass. Literally.

“We met Dusan and his slaves at Paddles. It seemed like a coincidence, but I think the evil SOB set it up. He wanted James from the moment he laid eyes on him, and Slorzack had this … power, like a sick little god, to make things happen, to seem to know everything, to just … appear. God, he made my skin crawl.”

I felt something moving, unseen. A power was in motion, something set loose and coming my way. I couldn't track it. My Ajna chakra was no help; it was not functioning properly. I couldn't tell what direction it was coming at me from, but it set my teeth on edge, and it worried me that it rose up the moment Trace began describing Slorzack. I began to gather my will through the static of my hangover and exhaustion. I was off, and it was at the worst possible time for me to be off.

The storm picked up outside, and there was distant growl of thunder.

“Then we started running into them at the private parties, the secret clubs,” Trace said. “Next thing I know, we were part of Slorzack's inner circle. James was his slave, and his apprentice. Like I said, James was into high weirdness—there was some kind of cult or secret society on Wall Street that he was part of. He practiced magic, fucking magic, and let me tell you something, it's real! That crazy shit is real!”

“Do tell,” I said, gesturing to the waiter that we were leaving. I dropped fifty on the table. I really couldn't afford to do that now, but I couldn't afford wasting the time for checks and change, or the attention of cops if we dined and dashed, either. Whatever it was, it was accelerating, and I had to get us moving before it locked on us.

“What are you doing?” Trace asked, rising. “Didgeri said you could protect me, help me. I can't go home, I can't go to work. They're everywhere. They think I had something to do with James's death.”

“I'll protect you,” I said, palming the rectangular glass salt shaker off the table. “Get your coat on, we're going. They're making their move, and we have to keep a few steps ahead of them if we're going to stay alive.”

“How do I know you're not with them, that I can trust you?” he said as he put on his raincoat.

I opened the salt shaker and poured the salt into my right palm. I focused on the energy in my Muladhara chakra; it was like slogging through mud. I envisioned the red four-petal lotus opening. The image wasn't easy, and my sacral and gonad energies were, let us say, less than at optimal.

Training overcame as much of my stupidity and poor choices as it could, and I felt the protective energies, the sense of security, of fight-or-flight fill my lower spine and travel down my arm. I made a fist, cradling the salt. I carefully synchronized the harmonics of the crystalline matrix of the salt with the energy as best I could and filled each grain with my power. They were beautiful in my blurry third eye's perception, looking like blocks of frosted glass, filling with the crimson energy of my seventh chakra.

“Fair enough,” I said, walking toward the front door. “I need you to finish your story, and I may need you as insurance to help keep them off my ass too,” I said. “I'm your best bet to survive right now. Magic is real? No shit. I am a fucking magical rock star, and I can tell you if we don't fucking run, right now, Alex. We are both dead.”

He paused for a single heartbeat, then nodded and began to follow me out the door. Outside, the rain became a dark curtain, knifing down. Lightning flashed. I didn't have to wait for the thunder.

Contact. Shit.

The door of Café Sage exploded in a hail of broken glass and steel. Over the sound of the door disintegrating was a horrible organic sound, an angry guttural snarl mixed with an almost plaintive whine. It was an animal sound—plural, animals.

I grabbed Trace by the arm and pulled him, hard, over the table I was sliding across. I flipped it to shield us both from the fragments of the exploding door, but I felt pinprick stings across my cheek and hand, and when I looked at Trace, he was bleeding too, from his forehead and cheek.

“What the hell!” Trace screamed. I got my ass off the floor and grabbed him with my free left hand, jerking him to his feet.

“Run!” I said, heading back into the restaurant. The customers, the staff were shouting, screaming; there was a barrage of frightened English, Chinese, Thai. The snarls again, and the table we had been hiding behind flew through the air and was shaken, splintered, ripped apart.

“Run!” I screamed again, pushing Trace ahead of me. I didn't know what else to say.

 

NINE

Fear tends to affect people in a couple of different ways. There is blind, mindless herd panic—stampede. Trace was in near stampede mode, as were the majority of the people in Café Sage. I, fortunately, have lived through enough stampedes to be graced with a different way to process terror: A hyperacuity settles over me when everything goes to hell and I am in fear for my life. It all slows down, and it all becomes very high-def.

Trace was ahead of me, running toward the back of the café, while most of the patrons and staff were trying to push past us to flee through the shattered front door. The invisible, snarling creatures sounded about fifteen feet or so away from my back.

As people bumped and pushed past me, screaming, I shouted to Trace. “Kitchen!” I yelled, and gestured toward the swinging door to our left, past the bar.

Trace veered and hit the kitchen door like a linebacker on steroids. He vanished into the kitchen and I followed, running. Behind me, the invisible things were buzz-sawing through the customers who were trying to get past them to the street. A few people, seeing others lifted off the ground by an invisible force and then shaken and rended to a screaming, painful death opted for the other way fear can claim you: They curled into a fetal ball under a table or against a wall and lost their will and their minds.

The kitchen was stainless steel islands, bays of stoves, and massive monolithic freezers and fridges. The cook staff was evenly divided between those headed into the restaurant toward snarling faceless death and those who were cutting out the back door to the alleyway. I gestured for Trace to head out the back door. I grabbed a discarded white apron off a steam table and knotted it up into a makeshift satchel, careful to not spill the salt I was still palming. I began to move quickly between the aisles, grabbing items as I saw the need for them, and stuffing them into my new bag.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Trace screamed from the door. “Come on!”

I quickly grabbed a few more things. The snarling was coming closer, and the screams were fading away, one by one. I made it to the back door.

“This way,” I said to Trace, pointing left. Once he was out in the alleyway, I joined him but held the kitchen door open. The rain was a heavy, pounding curtain of cold water.

“What the hell is that thing?” he asked as I knelt by the doorway. “And you picked a great fucking time to start grocery shopping.”

“I don't know what it is yet,” I said. “I have a few ideas, but I need more information.” I knelt on one knee and carefully began to pour a line of the salt along the inner edge of the door, going left to right, trying to keep it as dry as I could while Heaven pissed on us.
“Non pertransibis, ferreo canis exprimamus,”
I incanted, then turned back to Trace. “The stuff I grabbed is the closest thing to weapons we have right now. Calm down, Alex. Stick with me, do what I say, when I say it, and you'll be all right.”