Nightwise (20 page)

I had wondered to what degree we were being watched here in the Tombs, and now I could perceive the forces arrayed against us. It was mostly passive glamours—colored threads of frozen power, welded by will, crimsons and emeralds, azure and gold tripwires, invisible to human eyes. It was a very passive, but elaborate, web of magics. As long as you weren't trying to break out, the spells slumbered. However, it was keyed to a specific array of spells—apportation, for example. Other magics, like the one I was using to view and the one I planned to undertake with Darren's dope, would be virtually invisible to the wards, wouldn't cause a quiver in the web. Again, I was surprised at how low-rent the Illuminati were being. Something was missing. There was a part of the story I was not privy to. But I was going to get my answers before I walked away. I had paid for them.

Tobacco would have worked better for this, but I was down to three cigarettes from the pack I had palmed on my first day, which didn't give me much to work with. A lot of the brands out there, this one included, were doped with certain spirit- and will-killing chemicals. The more industrially processed the plant material was, the harder my job was going to be. So wacky tobaccy it was.

Now that I knew our surveillance was passive, and my working wasn't going to set off bells and whistles, I spread the marijuana on the floor before me. I resumed my cross-legged lotus position, closed my eyes, and filled myself with cleansing air, cleansing energy. I was made of sunlight and cool breeze, in a frame of ivory bone; I had a staircase of swirling, pulsating divinity running along my spine.

I opened my eyes and fell into a universe of emerald, a forest of cool green light. The spiritual essence of the marijuana embraced me like a mother's arms. This forest was old, older than man. It knocked down the puny concrete walls that tried to bind me, undid the wonder of the city that enfolded me, choking it to dust with relentless, clinging tendrils and the acid of time. I was small, puny meat in the cathedral of the Green Man. I called out in the chartreuse air. My voice echoed in a space where life had no vocal cords. The world was silent. I had to go deeper, push deeper like a seed screaming, sliding, tearing its way to the sky and to light. I had to shift my energy, my thoughts away from the rigid, independent animal brain to the thought-stream of spores and roots. Knowledge and language flowed like water, settling, spreading in the damp soil, both slow and quicksilver fast—a knowing without the foundation of logic or the handholds of sensory perception. I was flying across the high wire without a neural net, so to speak.

I called out again, seeking an audience with the force that inhabited this temple of leaf, stem, and seed. My voice was no longer human; it was impulses, emotions softer and less blunt than the boot of words, subtle, with nuances like the perfume that seduces the bee.

The spirit in the leaf answered me. When it finally spoke, it had a Mexican accent. By that, I mean it conveyed its geography of origin to me in such a way that it made an association in my physical human brain. It was an old spirit, a powerful one, tied closely to the founding of magic and the rending of veils between worlds. I called it “Red.”

I told Red what I needed it to do. Naturally, it was reluctant to do much of anything; most nonhuman-inhabiting spirits are pretty chill. Then I told it what I would give it, and it agreed. Blood buys a lot.

We concluded the bargain, and I slowly moved my awareness, my consciousness, back into the lonely, cold world of animal autonomy. It felt a little like the BDSM condition they call sub-drop, a feeling of loneliness, disconnection, disorientation after intense emotional and physical sensation. Anyone who ever came off an acid trip gets the same kind of feeling, an intense perception of not being in sync with the world anymore. It takes a while for your senses and your mind to reboot.

“Hey, Crowley, you okay, man? You were zoning for a long time. I don't know how much more time you got before they come.”

I groaned and crawled off the floor, gathering the pot back in its baggie. I took one of the few tobacco cigarettes I still had, laid it on the bed with the pot and a pen cap I had managed to acquire during my last visit to the interrogation room, and I began the slow and very careful process of swapping out the tobacco for the newly awakened marijuana in the paper. I ruined one of the three remaining cigarettes trying, but I learned from my mistakes and managed to stuff the other two with the pot. I put them back in the crumpled pack with the lighter and stuffed them in my jeans pocket. I tossed the remainder of the bag of Red across the corridor between the bars to Darren just as the door at the end of the cell block thudded and groaned open. He scooped up the bag and gave me a huge grin and a thumbs-up.

“Don't forget me, Crowley,” he whispered.

“Never,” I said. “Thank you, man.”

*   *   *

When they took the hood off my head, I was back in the interrogation room. It hadn't changed. Skinny and Lou hadn't changed. Lou had a chili stain on his tie. I decided not to mention it to him. The three of us were alone again. Skinny told me to sit.

I did.

“So,” Skinny said, “what shall we do tonight? You ready to talk now, to fill in the blanks?”

I nodded stiffly. My body language was that of defeat, of a broken little scuttling crab of a human being. It actually was very easy to pull off. I had been so close to cracking, to breaking. I was scared of these two men, and I would have nightmares about this room until the day I died. I was pretty sure my Hell would be the interrogation room.

“Good,” Lou rumbled. He didn't mean it. I was pretty sure he went home every night and jerked off to what he had been doing to me. Lou wanted this to keep going forever. He was good at his work, and like most people who are, he loved it.

I took out the crumpled pack of smokes, my hands shaking. I pulled the first one out and put it to my lips. Skinny lit it, like he was rewarding a good child. Smoke swirled around the terminator of the overhead shade. There was still enough tobacco in there that the scent of the pot wasn't immediately noticeable.

“Let's start with your name,” Skinny said, opening his folder and clicking his pen. He had a fresh yellow legal pad at the ready. He seemed relaxed. I was broken, now came the easy part.

“Ballard,” I said. “Laytham Ballard.” Skinny nodded and scribbled a note.

“You're the cracker asshole that was stupid enough to tangle with that trickster god thing that was screwing with that family in St. Louis,” Skinny said. “What did they call that thing, Jimmy Squarefoot, a few years back? Biggest supernatural discharge since the Tunguska Blast in Russia, I heard.”

“Yes,” I said. “I am indeed that stupid cracker asshole.”

“Bullshit,” Lou said. “Ballard is a fucking occult legend. He raised the dead at ten, ripped off the philosopher's stone from Joey Dross in Vegas back in 1999. He's fucking James Bond, Gandalf, and Jim Morrison all rolled up into one. Bullshit some sniveling little pissant like you is Laytham Ballard.”

“I know it's hard to meet your idols, Lou,” I said, smiling, and took a puff on the cigarette. “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him, right?”

Lou began to move toward me menacingly, but Skinny stopped him with a gesture.

“You've demonstrated some occult aptitude and pulled off some impressive stunts I can't explain and my superiors can't either, so I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt about who you say you are. And you are telling us now that you killed James Berman, correct, Mr. Ballard?” Skinny said, back to focus.

I took a long drag on the cigarette and regarded Skinny. “So you guys didn't kill him because I was coming to talk to him about Dusan Slorzack?” I said, watching his eyes, his posture. Skinny looked down at his pad and scribbled another note. He avoided my gaze. Lou shifted nervously and glared at me.

“We're asking the questions here. What was the link between this Slorzack and Berman?” Skinny said. I smiled, and the fear went up out of me, like the mellow smoke I blew toward the ceiling. I leaned forward in my chair, across the table.

“So the others, the other people that died on my way to Berman, that wasn't you guys covering your tracks, was it? You weren't tying up loose ends for the Secret Masters, for the Illuminati? The Illuminati doesn't have a fucking clue what Slorzack and Berman were up to?”

“The All-Seeing Eye…” both Lou and Skinny droned.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, ‘sees all.' I got that. But whatever caper Slorzack pulled off blinded even the All-Seeing Eye. Wow. That's Dr. Strange-level badass.”

I crushed out the cigarette on the table and regarded Skinny and Lou with a newfound contempt. They really didn't have a clue. My hands glided to the crushed pack and the last smoke. They didn't shake anymore. I took the last cigarette. The room was full of pot smoke now, drifting in swirling, milky pools around the light.

“Y'see, I knew something was wrong with this picture. The way you guys were going about this, the really low-budget magic being used. The Illuminati is top-shelf all the way. If they needed info out of me, they would have ritually killed me and had my spirit worked over by some hard pipe-hitting demons from the Dante Union. The things you gave away without even meaning to, I just couldn't figure it all out. Until now.”

Lou had his straight razor out. He moved toward me. Again, Skinny gestured to hold. He kept making notes as I wrote, but I could tell he was getting angry. This was not part of his script.

“I needed to know just how fucked I was, guys,” I said. “If this was a top-to-bottom Illuminati operation, then I was pretty much dead. But if Berman was freelancing, and I just happened to bump into you guys while hunting for my war criminal, then it was all good. You feel me?”

“Listen, you little maggot,” Skinny said. It had taken awhile, but I had finally gotten on his nerves. “We don't give a damn what you were running. You are the prime suspect in the death of a member of the Inner Cabal of the Five Boroughs and we are going—”

I laughed and pulled out the white lighter. I slipped the cigarette between my lips. They were dry, swollen, and cracked.

“The Cabal of the Five Boroughs! Jesus, that's like the occult equivalent of the Lions Club. So your boy Berman was a flyweight. And I'm guessing you guys are too. What crew you with, Seraphim? The Fists of Gevruah? Give out occult parking tickets and pick up the Secret Masters' dry cleaning?” I laughed again. They were out of position, out of control, emotional. I was ice. I was going to enjoy every second of this.

Skinny sputtered at his slip. Lou moved beside me. He dropped the straight razor on the table in front of me. Teutonic runes of power were etched onto the mother-of-pearl handle. A
+
1 magic straight razor. Cool. I never noticed that all the times he had used it on me. Must have been distracted. He leaned down next to my face. I could smell Aqua Velva, garlic, and decay.

“Say hello to your new girlfriend, shit kicker,” he hissed.

I flicked the white lighter and flame caressed the tip of the cigarette. I drew a deep breath in and let the smoke nestle deep in my lungs.

“We got a man in this precinct who is going to blow your head off, because you came at him with this,” Lou said. “Let's see how smart you are without a face, redneck.”

“Suscitare,”
I said as I exhaled.

I blew smoke in Lou's face. His eyes clouded and then became milky white. He gasped and staggered back, rubbing at them franticly, then clawing at his throat as if he were trying to ward off a strangler. I exhaled in Skinny's direction as his eyes widened in understanding. A cloud of rich, pungent marijuana smoke grabbed him like a long-lost lover. He fumbled to stand and groped for his piece as his eyes failed him too, behind magical cataracts.

I grabbed the razor, flicked out the polished silver blade, and opened up Lou's neck in one smooth, fluid motion. His blood was a hot curtain that sprayed across the table.

I was up now, and I sidestepped behind Lou and held his massive, convulsing body as a shield. Skinny fired his 9mm wildly. It made virtually no sound inside the swirl of living smoke, dull thuds like shoes being kicked off onto the floor. The first round went into a wall; the second hit Lou in the chest and knocked both him and me over onto the floor. Skinny was screaming for help, but the smoke held the air in his lungs. He dropped his gun and clawed at his throat.

By now I had Lou's gun out. I pulled myself clear of his twitching carcass and carefully aimed. I put a single, quiet bullet into Skinny's forehead. There was an eruption of skull, black blood, and brain across the back wall. He dropped like a puppet with his strings cut and was still.

I wiped off the gun and put it in Lou's hand. I walked over and placed the straight razor next to Skinny, close to where his hand lay. The smoke swirled around the room like fog. It obscured sound, sight, and even surveillance cameras. In the smoke, I could hear the spirit of the leaf licking its chops at the cooling Seraphim.

“Edere,”
I said to Red.

I collected the Seraphim's notes, the legal pads, the folders, and the clipboards. They were in code and not on normal NYPD report forms. Good, I hadn't legally been put into the system at all. I checked their wallets and was not surprised to find they had more money than clean cops could possibly possess. They sure didn't spend it on clothes. I took enough money to get me away from here but left enough to keep them looking dirty. I scribbled a quick note on a sheet of yellow legal paper. It said, “He knows about the Trace hit and the mole, eliminate him.” I slid a few thousand dollars in with the note, folded it, and stuck it in Skinny's coat pocket. I pulled my hair back, stuffed as much of it as I could under my collar, and took Skinny's coat, which had managed to avoid the spray of blood.