Sacrifices (10 page)

In the alley to their left, pressed up against the white-painted brick of a destitute restaurant, stood the one the gangsters had called Freak. Must be serious, Anna thought. She was off Locos turf, and with that big tattoo across the back of her head, rival gangs wouldn't have a hard time guessing she didn't belong here.

Anna approached the alley. “What's up?”

The girl swallowed. She moved constantly, her weight never staying on one foot for more than a second or so as she shifted and shuffled. Nervous energy. She was wound
tight
. “My old man. You knew him back in the day.”

“Your . . . ?” There was only one possible answer. “Moreno?”

“Yeah.”

How old was this girl? Sixteen? Nineteen? “That was before you were born, kid.”

“And what? You so fuckin' old you don't remember back then?”

Anna looked back toward where they'd come from. No gangbangers in sight, but still. “You shouldn't be here,” Anna said.

Freak shrugged. “Ain't your problem. How'd you know my dad?”

This was weird. Anna checked the sidewalk again, then Nail. If he had an opinion, she couldn't read it. On Freak's face, a sort of agitation as she softly clicked her teeth together over and over. Her eyes were too wide, too intent.

“Are you tweakin'?” Anna asked.

“Hey,
fuck
you. I'm serious.” Hurt flashed, and then was replaced by anger. She wasn't on anything, Anna didn't think. She just wanted answers, and she was high-strung by nature. Anna guessed that, with that kind of intensity and the willingness to creep through territory owned by rival gangs to get a few questions answered, Freak got most of what she wanted. Probably none of it came easy, but Anna bet she got it just the same.

“He was a good guy,” Anna said. “Used to round up his homeboys and walk me and some other kids to school. I never got beat up when he was around.”

“He don't do that no more,” Freak said. “Good way to get a kid shot.”

“Jesus.” Drive-bys into crowds of school kids, just to try to cap some guy who lived the next street over. What was happening down here? She was pretty sure most people who said things were better in the old days were full of shit, but
Jesus
. This shit
had
been better when she was a kid.

“What else?” Anna asked.

“Just tell me, okay? Something.” Quietly, she added: “Anything.”

There was the slightest quaver in Freak's voice, and that was what decided Anna. Whatever was going on between Freak and her old man probably wasn't good, not if Freak was tracking down a complete stranger to ask about him when she, in all likelihood, freaking
lived
with him. It would be dumb to get in the middle of that, but there was that plaintive quaver as Freak tried to keep her voice tough, and it was all over.

“Dana—my mom, I guess—spent most of her time pretty fucked-up when I was a kid,” Anna said. “Hazed out on morphine or something like it. I don't fuckin' know. Whatever it was, she was out of it most of the time. Drooling on the couch, that kind of thing. I learned to make a peanut butter sandwich pretty young, you know?”

Freak nodded. She knew. There were probably a couple of Danas in the neighborhood right now. Everybody knew who they were. Hell, when Anna had been a kid, the neighbor ladies took turns bringing her food whenever Dana disappeared for a few days. One of them even let Anna sleep at her place sometimes. Funny how you forgot things like that.

“So, this one time, I'm like, hell, I don't know—six? Seven? And I'm watching TV, and Dana's loading up her rig behind me, because that's the kind of parent she was. And she suddenly goes into this screaming fit, loud enough to make your ears ring. You know something fucked-up? I thought it was my fault. She started the same time I changed the channel, and I thought . . . I was a kid. Not real smart.”

Freak wasn't laughing. Nail, either. Both watched her, but neither made a sound.

“Anyway,” Anna continued, looking away from Nail, “I guess she got a bad load or something, because she's screaming and throwing shit, and I'm hiding under this shitty coffee table with my hands over my ears while plates are
exploding
against the walls. She put a chair leg through the wall into the next apartment and scared the hell out of
the neighbor lady who came to calm her down. Ran her off, chased her down the hall with a knife.

“I guess that's probably when somebody called the cops.” When Freak raised her eyebrows in skepticism, Anna nodded. “Yeah. It was that bad.” Almost nobody called the police here—there was too much mistrust, too many years of neglect and violence and bad blood. The community took care of most things themselves. “I think the lady next door must've told 'em there was a kid involved or something, because it seemed like they showed up pretty fast. Or maybe time gets funny when you're hiding under a table with your eyes shut and your hands over your ears.

“So, next thing I know, somebody grabs my arm and hauls me out from under the table, and now
I'm
screaming, and Dana's screaming, and two cops got her and one is swearing and wiping blood off his face, and that's about all I saw before they dragged her out. The guy they left told me something, I don't even know what. I was crying too much to hear by then. But he took me down to a cop car outside, and we went to the station.”

Anna paused, thoughtful. “He bought me McDonald's on the way. At the drive-through. That was pretty cool.” He'd had to calm her down first, Anna now remembered. She'd been certain that he was going to put her in jail, and it had taken him a little while to convince her otherwise.

“I spent the night in the cop shop, in, like, this waiting room. On these goddamn uncomfortable chairs with these fake leather cushion things. They were sticky. I think it took Dana about two more hours to stop screaming—I could hear her down the hall, calling the cops every last name in the book. She was . . . She was
mean
.

“I was there for, I dunno, twenty minutes or something, when your old man showed up. He was maybe nineteen. I wasn't nothing to him, not family anyway. He walks over to me, puts out his hand, says, ‘Come on, Squeak. Let's get outta here.' So I took his hand. He had big hands, I thought. I wonder if that's even true, though. I was pretty small.

“The desk sergeant, he ain't having it. ‘You this little girl's father?' he asks. Your old man says no. ‘Are you
related?' No. ‘Sorry. Can't let you leave here with her.' So your old man leans in his ear, says something. This hard-ass cop makes about the saddest face I ever seen on a mean old white guy, but he just shakes his head. ‘Sorry, son. Those are the rules.'” Moreno had been careful, but Anna was pretty sure she knew what he'd said.
And you're gonna let her leave with
her? Pointing back at the cells, where the noise was still going on.

“You know what your old man did?”

“Knocked that fucker out, I bet,” Freak said.

“Nope. You gotta understand, he was
known
. The cops knew him, lot of them did anyway, and he was covered in gang tats. I bet he had outstanding warrants. I don't think that woulda stopped him decking that cop—but where would that leave me?

“No,” Anna said. “This tough gangbanger, long-ass rap sheet, probably actually wanted for some damn thing at the time—this hard, hard man sat down and spent the whole night in that cop shop waiting room with me.”

Freak's expression was painful to see. Her eyes swam and her jaw clenched, trembling with an emotion lost between rage and sorrow.

“He was a good guy,” Anna said. “That's what I know about him. Cut him some slack, huh?”

Looking away from Anna, Freak let a long breath escape through her teeth. “It's a good story,” she said after a moment. “Wish I knew that guy.”

Anna stood there, suddenly aware of her hands, her stance, her expression. What was appropriate for a conversation like this? “Um,” she said, and couldn't think of a single thing to follow it with.

“Hey,” Freak said. “You come back to the barrio, you can drop by. It'd be cool.” Suddenly all business, or at least pretending to be, she gave her number to Anna. Then she took off back down the alley.

Anna turned to Nail, who wore a nonplussed expression she couldn't quite interpret.

“Don't look at me all weird like that,” Anna said. “We all got sob stories.”

“Weird? No way. I was just wondering if you made all that shit up. If so, you're a hell of a liar.”

“Oh, fuck you,” she said, laughing. “You see the guy with the tear tat?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, let's go see if Karyn wants in on this. You feel up to some recon later?”

He nodded.

Sobell was beyond
climbing the walls—he was ready to blow them up. Only the shaking in his hands, that constant reminder that he was athwart the razor's edge that separated life from whatever screaming horror awaited him if he magicked himself up some mayhem, prevented him from actually doing it.

There were other reminders, too. He'd taken off his watch, having twice glimpsed a ghostly reflection of something in it—a face peering out at him, perhaps, or perhaps a hand pressed against the glass cover, symbolizing a metaphysical barrier of another kind. He hadn't gotten a clear look either time, and that was fine with him. Even the half glimpses he'd caught had set his heart racing, had forced panic sweat from his pores.

He snatched a pencil up from the table—something had glimmered in the metal of its eraser—and dropped it into a wastebasket, then covered it with a crumpled wad of paper.

“Running out of time,” Belial said, its tone a gleeful singsong. “So sad.” The man, or creature, was crouched in the mouth of its den. Sobell imagined he could smell its foul exhalations from where he stood, halfway across the room. A product of his overtaxed imagination, he hoped.

Sobell pursed his lips and gave Belial a disapproving scowl. “You have precious few allies right now. I would
think you'd be grateful to hang on to the ones you have rather than cheering on their impending unholy demise.”

“Go to Hell,” Belial said.

“My God, was that a joke? Is it possible you've discovered a sense of humor after, lo, these many millennia?” He knew he shouldn't provoke it. The self-control of demons was in notoriously short supply, and this one had already happily watched dozens of its followers meet brutal ends. It would be only too happy to tear off his face or turn him inside out or whatever it did for a good time when it was pissed off. Pity his own patience had been ground down to a nub.

Belial leered at him, spreading its grin wide so he could see all its teeth. Normal enough teeth for a fifty-year-old man, but they just made Sobell wonder why he'd never realized teeth were so unsettling before. They were made, patently, for ripping and tearing and grinding and crushing, and even though he had a set of his very own, and probably one in better condition, he thought it likely that Belial would come out the victor, and comfortably so, if they squared off with no other weapons. He shuddered, and the shaking in his hands redoubled.

Belial laughed again.

A sharp, stupid comment rose to Sobell's lips and was cut off by a knock at the door.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“It's me.” Genevieve's voice. “And, uh, I have company. He insisted.”

He . . . ? Wilkinson?

I'm not even armed
. Sobell glanced around the room for a weapon of some kind.
Why am I not armed?

“Mr.—uh, sir?”

“How many?”

“Just me and him.”

Good odds, anyway, if it came to a fight. Unless Belial sided with Wilkinson, and Genevieve turned on him as well. Belial, it seemed, wasn't the only one running low on allies. This was pathetic.

Sobell unlocked the door and swung it open, stepping to the side so he couldn't be seen from the parking lot. “By all means, come in.”

Genevieve walked into the room, followed by a thin, weatherworn man—Clarence Wilkinson, presumably, though Sobell had never actually seen him in person. He wasn't one of Sobell's normal guys, which was the whole point here.

Wilkinson recoiled as he stepped into the room, his face briefly twisting into a moue of disgust before he masked it. Sobell felt a brief flash of irritation, both at the man for daring to show his disgust even for a moment and for the sorry state he'd found himself in, but he let it go. It
did
stink in here, and Sobell had probably gotten used to the worst of it. What must it be like for somebody walking in from the comparatively fresh air of the street?

“Mr. Sobell,” Wilkinson said, extending a hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

Sobell reached out quickly, grasping the man's hand before the shaking could become too obvious. “Mr. Wilkinson,” he said.

“Call me Clarence. Everybody does.”

“Enoch,” Sobell said, choking down resentment. It was miserable, degrading, to act as though he was on the same level as a common street loan shark—but for the moment he was. Likely, he needed Mr. Wilkinson—
Clarence
—far more than the other man needed him at this juncture. And he supposed it never hurt to be respectful.

“She says you want guys,” Clarence said.

“That's correct. Did she mention my offer of restitution as well?”

“Yeah.” Clarence walked to the table, and Sobell swore the man checked it over for filth before sitting down on the edge. He lifted his soda bottle to his mouth and spat into it. Sobell tried not to make a face.

“I appreciate it,” Clarence said.

“However . . . ?”

The man frowned, creases deepening over his face.
God, he looked as old as Sobell felt. “
But
, I got problems money can't fix.”

“I don't believe there's any such thing.”

“No shit? Why don't you tell me how you bought off the feds, then?”

Sobell tried on a sarcastic smile. “I didn't have
enough
money. It's not the same thing.”

“You got enough money to straighten out my boys?”

“That depends on what kind of straightening out they need.”

Clarence looked pointedly over at Belial. The demon had withdrawn back into its lair, but Sobell could see its eyes glistening as it watched. It was rocking back and forth, muttering to itself in a dozen voices.

“What the fuck is his problem?” Clarence asked.

“A little too crowded in the attic, I believe.”

“Can you get that straightened out?”

“In his case? No way in hell.”

“Well, then I ain't sure how you can help me.”

“Ah.” Sobell cleared his throat. In a lower voice, he continued. “If
that's
the sort of problem your ‘boys' have, I might be able to come up with something. His situation is . . . extreme. Less advanced cases are rather more tractable.”

“Yeah? When?”

“After I take care of
my
problem.”

Clarence fixed Sobell with a deadpan, dull-eyed stare that Sobell didn't find companionable in the least. “You make a lot of money doing business like that? 'Cuz I never did.”

“I'm not sure I follow you.”

“Doing a solid for somebody who can maybe help you out down the line, that's one thing. Doing the same for somebody who's in the gutter—well, that ain't worked out so well for me.” Amazingly, he looked away from Sobell long enough to pull a canister of chewing tobacco out of his pocket. He lifted the lid, pulled out a pinch of the stuff, and stuck it in his gob. “You on your way down, son,” he said.

Son! This miserable shit just called
me
son?
In his pockets, Sobell's hands shook with rage. He tried to keep his voice even. “You want to be
very
certain about that before you make any decisions, Mr. Wilkinson.”

“Clarence, please.” He chewed with his mouth open, and Sobell got the distinct impression the bastard was doing it for the sake of insolence.

“A great many people, Clarence, have troubled themselves to kick me when I was down at various points in my career. A few of them lived long, miserable lives of regret once I regained my footing. The rest . . . didn't.”

If the words fazed Clarence at all, it didn't show. He just sat there, chewing his tobacco and staring as if he were watching a particularly dull game of golf on TV.

“Allow me to make myself plain. If I get what I need without your help, you will sorely wish you'd been of assistance. If I do not get what I need, and I am, in fact, ‘on my way down,' I am going to take every last soul who ever crossed me down with me. I assure you, there is nowhere on earth you can escape my vengeance.
That
is a problem money cannot solve.”

Clarence's face betrayed nothing, but he swallowed once, thickly. He was rattled, Sobell thought. Time for the olive branch.

“I'm offering cash and legal help now, and a solution to your other problems once my problem is solved. Surely you can see that I'm meeting you at least partway.”

“Gonna take more than a hundred and twenty.”

Sweet merciless Christ, is that what this is about? Negotiation? Filthy fucking lucre?
“I can put another eighty on top of that. Is that sufficient?”

Clarence made a show of inspecting his fingernails, drew the moment out, and at last nodded. “Yeah. So, how about you tell me what you want with my guys?”

*   *   *

Genevieve was standing in the corner, listening to Sobell outline his needs to Clarence, when her phone buzzed a single time. Nobody paid her any attention. The two men
kept talking, and Belial remained in his lair, getting off on whatever unspeakable thoughts he enjoyed in private.

The phone buzzed a second time. Maybe it was Anna. Who else would have texted her?

She listened to the conversation drag on. They'd moved on to boring parts. Sobell wanted Clarence to sponge up any rumors he could for starters, but after that it would be a systematic search through any areas that seemed as though they might vaguely match up with Karyn's prophecy. It would be a mess, a slog, an impossibly slow combing of a vast area with whatever manpower Clarence could scrounge up, without ever knowing exactly what they were looking for. A hundred men wouldn't be enough.

They'd forgotten about her. She pulled out her phone and opened it.

A text message, and for a wonder, it was from Anna. It contained a photograph of a street corner and a building on which somebody had drawn a large warding diagram of some kind. The message below the photo read
Any idea what this is?

She zoomed in. There were pieces of the drawing she recognized, some standard components she'd used in her own work, though never like this. Most of the rest of it was utterly foreign, but that didn't mean she had nothing to go on. The half circle with a squiggle hanging off it looked like a variant of the Judas Mark, which wasn't the sort of thing you'd use if you were wishing somebody luck.

What the hell was Anna into?

Not sure,
she typed.

Anna's response came back in moments:
Find out.

OK. U all right?

She waited. Clarence ran down a list of names and places while Sobell shook his head and furrowed his brow.

Five minutes later, no further messages had come. Anna was still pissed, or at least impatient, and Genevieve couldn't blame her. Anna's clock was ticking, and the deaths of Van Horn's entourage had been early and gruesome.

Clarence and Sobell wrapped up, neither sparing much
in the way of a friendly word for the other. Clarence gave Sobell an emergency contact number, much as Tran had, and told him he'd be back in the morning with help. Genevieve wondered if that was true.

Then he left.

“You got a fix for him?” Genevieve asked, just moments after the door closed. “For his guys, I mean?”

“
My
guys,” Belial said, the words followed by a rough, inarticulate sound like a snarl, like heavy cloth tearing. “My brothers and my sons, my sisters and my daughters, feasting at last.”

“It would be to our advantage if they could hold off on the feasting and focus on the task,” Sobell said. “How, uh, just how much control do you have over their actions? A great deal, I hope?”

“They heed my words and work my will. They laugh in darkness, they—”

“Oh, for fuck's sake!” Sobell snapped. “Is there anyone in that overcrowded, massively dense skull of yours that can concentrate for one minute? That can actually
think
? We are fucked here, Belial, you and me together, and if you can't keep your goddamn babbling in check and
focus
, we'll both go down right now, with my hands wrapped around your miserable throat. I am
through
with this idiocy!”

Belial lurched through the opening to his lair. Half his face was flushed a violent red, and his beard had started coming out in clumps. His eyes shone with fury. “Do not presume to lecture
me
, man-child. I have laid low Belphegor and Astaroth, Malgaras and Amenadiel have cowered before me, I have devoured
civilizations
. The likes of you aren't fit to wipe my ass.”

Sobell quailed, but, to Genevieve's surprise, he stood his ground. “The likes of me are all you have, you thick son of a whore. So
help us
!”

“Help us,”
Belial said, voice high and mocking.
“Please, help us.”
He staggered forward and stopped, steadying himself with a white-knuckled death grip on the edge of the table. For a moment, Genevieve expected him to hurl
the table aside and lunge at Sobell, but he merely stood, grinning.

The room darkened, and Belial's grin widened into an obscene leer. Behind him, the walls of the room dimmed, becoming insubstantial, like reflections of themselves in dark windows. They seemed transparent, yet the parking lot and the street weren't visible beyond them—only an inky black darkness that went on forever. Genevieve glanced at Sobell to see that he, too, had thinned out. She could see the door through his body. Then the door itself faded, disappearing entirely into blackness.

“What—” She grasped at the word, but her breath had fled her body. She felt her chest hitch, her shoulders heaving as she started to hyperventilate.
This isn't real. It's a trick. Just a trick.

In the darkness that now surrounded them, a thousand pairs of shining slitted eyes opened. A thousand groaning, hungry sighs issued from a thousand invisible mouths. The filmy substance of Sobell's body spun off him in a thousand wispy spirals. Hunched shapes, visible only as suggestions in the light reflecting from gleaming eyes, leaned in, some looming, others scuttling or slithering.