Sacrifices (4 page)

“I'm worried about
this, guys,” Anna said. She stood on the sidewalk outside the municipal building, Karyn and Nail to her left, her feet frozen in place. Her reflection stared accusingly back from the tinted glass window in front of her.
Idiot,
it seemed to say.
What are you thinking?

“Don't start that shit again,” Nail said. “You're gonna freak me out.” He looked to Karyn. “You see anything?”

Karyn's noise of disgust was all the answer she gave.
Nope,
Anna thought. No surprise there. Karyn's bizarre gift of looking into the future was operating in too high a gear these days, which meant she saw too much from too many futures, and anything useful was drowned in the mess.

A man and a woman, both in business attire that would have sweat running down the cracks of their asses by the time they made half a block under the angry afternoon sun, passed by. The man looked the three of them over as he walked by, lingering overlong on Anna, it seemed.

“The fuck you lookin' at?” she asked. He turned abruptly away and walked faster. A thought came with the look of fear on his face:
Tear his throat out. Grab him, throw him down, and do it with your teeth. It'll be over before he can figure out what's happening.

She shook her head to clear it. That wasn't her, not really. Just the damn demon Belial had stuck in her head. Be easier to ignore if her mouth hadn't filled with saliva at the prospect.

“Everything cool?” Nail asked.

“Yeah,” she said, rubbing her temples with the middle finger and thumb of her right hand. “Fine. Let's go talk to the FBI.”

They went in, single file, through the revolving door, the air-conditioning blasting Anna and raising gooseflesh up the backs of her arms. The inside was gray, grim, and floored with pastel green linoleum, sending her catapulting right back to her days in juvie. A bored-looking security guard slouched in a chair that looked too flimsy to support him.

They went through the metal detector and Nail led the way to the elevators. He'd been here before, treating with the FBI in the deal that had ended up saving Anna and Karyn from Belial and his insane disciples. On balance, a good thing, even if it had ended up getting them far closer to law enforcement than Anna ever wished.

Onto the elevators, then off on the sixth floor. Nail led them down a dim hall lined in more grim wallpaper, this time tan, then knocked at the last door on the left.

The door opened on a trim black woman in an FBI suit, hair pulled back in a tight bun. Special Agent Elliot. Anna remembered her from a couple of hours of unpleasant questioning. That hungry rage surged inside her again, and she found herself baring her teeth before she could stop it. She forced her lips into a half-assed smile that probably looked more like a snarl.

“Glad you could make it,” Elliot said. She wasn't doing the tough cop thing today. She looked like shit, Anna thought—haggard face, bags under her eyes, suit looking like she'd slept in it. Even her shiny black FBI shoes looked scuffed.

“How you handling your Devil worshippers?” Nail asked.

Elliot gave a weary, disgusted chuckle. “We're managing our Devil worshippers fine; thank you.” She shook her head. “Devil worshippers. Normally, I'd be pissed about media sensationalism, but I can't even say they're wrong on this one. Come in.”

She opened the door wide and stepped back. The blinds
had been pulled down, leaving only the eye-straining fluorescents to light the room. A couple of long, sagging tables had been set up, one against the left wall and another against the right. A laptop sat on one, along with a scattered array of file folders. A corkboard to the left showed pictures of Anna, Karyn, Nail, and Genevieve, as well as Enoch Sobell, who had dozens of pictures below him. Anna found it more than a little unnerving to see her own face on an FBI corkboard, but at least she and the crew had been moved off to one side. Sobell was where the action was now.

Anna followed Nail to the table, with Karyn close behind.

“Are you ready to talk to me now?” Elliot asked. Anna felt a seasick anxiety she didn't think had anything to do with her demon. Elliot's weird FBI division freaked her out. “Non-Standard Investigations Branch,” Elliot had called it, a small department dealing with occult crimes. Its very existence had been news to Anna, and not good news, given the type of swag the crew usually dealt in.

“Hi, Special Agent,” Nail said. “Sure is good to see you again.”

“Hello, Mr. Owens. I didn't know you came for the company.”

“We're here to make a deal.”

Elliot gave him a grin that looked as though she was trying to cover up a scowl. “That didn't work out so well for us the last time.”

“
You
lost Sobell. That ain't on me.”

Elliot simply shrugged. “We can do witness protection,” she said. “If you can sign affidavits, we can get started this afternoon. You won't regret it. It's the right thing to do.”

“That's not the kind of arrangement we want,” Anna said. She should have let Nail handle it, she supposed, but the urge to
act
slammed against the inside of her chest like it wanted to knock its way out. She couldn't remain passive any longer, and whether that was her own impatience or an impulse of the demon's, she didn't care. Let it have its fun this time.

“Oh?” Elliot said. “What arrangement do you want?”

Anna tried to gauge Elliot's expression to see if she'd even be open to this sort of thing, but it was impenetrable. Nothing for it but to jump.

“We want an information-sharing arrangement.”

“A what?”

“We bring you occult shit or info, you tell us all about it.”

Elliot studied her for a moment, then slowly shook her head. “I'm sorry, but that's over the line,” she said. “The FBI doesn't share information with criminals.”

“We ain't asking you to tell us about a case or evidence,” Nail said.

“Think about it, Owens. Suppose somebody ends up dead, and it traces back to a piece of information I gave to an informant. Careers are ended over this kind of thing. People do time.”

“Sobell isn't working alone,” Karyn said quietly.

“Pardon?” The hungry expression on Elliot's face sent a shiver of unease down Anna's back.

Nail waved them off. “You know, Karyn probably shouldn'ta said nothing. She just wants to cooperate so much—well, hell. That info gets traced back to us, we could end up dead. So, you know. Forget we brought it up.” It was petty, but Anna couldn't help smiling. After being on the receiving end of all the jerking around these people had laid on him, Anna thought this was the most fun Nail had had in a month.

“Don't fuck with me, Owens,” Elliot said.

Nail, Anna, and Karyn waited silently, as though they'd coordinated this part.

“I will nail your asses to the wall for obstruction of justice,” Elliot said.

Still, they said nothing.

Elliot took another tack, softening her expression so quickly it was painfully obvious. “People are going to get hurt.”

“Some of those people might be my friends,” Nail said. “I saw how you handled that shit at the prison, so maybe you get why I ain't sure I want to drop this in your hands and walk away.”

The silence in the room drew out. Anna could hear a television set blaring through the wall, though she couldn't make out what was on.

“I need to make a phone call,” Elliot said.

“We gotta go feed the meter,” Anna said, quickly checking with Nail and Karyn to see if they wanted to contradict her. No alarms there, so she continued. “Give you a few minutes.”

The three of them filed out into the hall. Anna was pretty sure it was all over but the dickering. They'd probably come back with some ugly terms, but the naked ambition on Elliot's face was impossible to miss, and her weird-ass division of the FBI got all kinds of special privileges. She'd told Nail once before that there were some things they could do “off the books.” She'd find some way to get it done.

Anna, Karyn, and Nail walked down to the end of the hall. Anna looked out the window there. There were a couple of dead locusts wedged in halfway under a piece of roof flashing, remnants of one of Sobell's recent last-ditch maneuvers. How many last ditches did one man get? Still, the locusts were an unpleasant reminder of just who they were messing with here. A guy who'd bury L.A. in a carpet of bugs in order to get a little private time was a guy who wouldn't stop at much when his life was on the line.

“They are gonna put our asses in jail, right now,” Nail said.

“If they were gonna do that, they'd have done it after that prison shit show,” Anna said. “They got nothing. They need info. So do we. This should work.”

Karyn, as she often did, remained silent.

After almost twenty minutes, they headed back to the room. Nail knocked. “You about finished in there?” he asked.

Elliot opened the door and gestured for them to come in.

Nail came in and stood behind his chair. “What's the word?”

“We can work something out,” Elliot said.

“You even call anybody, or you just fucking with us?”

“I won't ask you about your business if you don't ask me about mine.”

Nail scoffed. “Your whole job is asking me about my business.”

“Enough already,” Anna said. “How's this going to work? We get you info, maybe some bits and pieces, and you help us out with the magic stuff?”

“Information only. No magic.”

“Depending on what?”

Elliot straightened her shoulders. “I don't think you fully understand the nature of the occult, Ms. Ruiz.”

“I understand you're being pretty fucking cheap with your help.”

“I'm not a practitioner.”

Anna gaped. “You're—what? You have absolutely got to be shitting me. You're up to your ass in this occult craziness every single damn day, and you can't actually
do
any of it?”

“Do you know what happens to practitioners, eventually? If they work enough magic over a period of time?”

“Does it matter?”

“Magic is . . . corrosive. Eventually, it opens a giant rip in some kind of, for lack of a better term, metaphysical membrane inside the practitioner, through which a demon invariably passes and assumes total control of the body. There's quite a debate about whether the person inside is still there or not in any meaningful sense, but what we do know is that they are totally subsumed. Gone. Forever.”

“Yeah, I get that, believe me,” Anna said. It was relatively new information, a recent, gigantic point of contention between her and Genevieve, and still unsettling. “So you never touch the stuff? Ever?”

Elliot leaned forward and put her elbows on her knees. “Think about it for a minute. Do you think the United States Government would entrust any important mission or sensitive information to a person who is
guaranteed
to flip over to the dark side at some point? There's actually a directive that prohibits it, except under very, very controlled circumstances, and I can assure you those individuals are not
just out wandering around, let alone in charge of any kind of investigation.”

“So it's not just you,” Nail put in. “Your whole weird-ass division doesn't have the juice to light a candle between 'em.”

“That's right.”

“Jesus,” Nail said.

“We're not helpless,” Elliot pointed out. “We've simply decided not to use one class of weapon that has a tendency to blow up in the user's face.”

Anna paced a short section of floor and fought the urge to punch something. “Mmm-hmm. So what can you do?”

“I told you. Information. I may not be an occult practioner, but the bureau has access to a wealth of information.”

“We're going to need some assurances,” Karyn said.

“What kind of assurances?”

“Something on paper. Blessed by an attorney. We share info with you—”

“You don't use it to fuck us,” Anna said.

Elliot sat and smoothed her skirt over her lap. “There are two ways to do this. One is totally off the books. No paper, no guarantees. No attorneys. You take my word, and that's it. The other way is
on
the books. Attorneys, deals, an official seal of approval—and I can tell you right now, the only deal I'm willing to make on the books is the one where you testify.”

“We can pay you,” Anna said. Karyn glared at her.

“I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that,” Elliot said.

“I don't think this works,” Karyn said. “We're done here.”

Elliot crossed her arms.

“Belial,” Anna said. A flicker of alarm crossed Elliot's. A second later, she was all business, but Anna knew she hadn't misread that.

“Where did you hear that name? What do you know about it?”

“Call if you change your mind,” Anna said. She left
the room with Karyn and Nail following close behind. To her slight surprise, Elliot let them go.

The elevator ride down to the ground floor was deathly quiet, and if Anna had wanted to punch something before, now she wanted to pull somebody's head off. She stalked out of the municipal building in a furious haze, still fuming at Elliot's pigheadedness. What the hell was the woman thinking? Did she want this or what?

Nail was the first to speak. “I don't believe you guys just did that,” he said as they hit the sidewalk. “We gotta go back.”

“No way. We lose all credibility if we do that now.”

“You gotta understand, I don't think this situation is what you call symmetrical.”

“No, it's not,” Anna said. “They want what we've got more than we need what they have.”

“Are you shitting me? We got
no
occult support. It's like we're—”