Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (26 page)

Leaving Mick alone with Suzanne and several dozen interested spectators, including her seething pretty boy. Mick knocked back a generous swallow of his screwdriver, and offered the first conversational gambit, asking a simple question about how she accomplished one of the effects in her act.

An hour later, he was wishing Suzanne’s pretty boy would just go ahead and slip strychnine in his glass, because it would be less excruciating than this. The boy was hovering, green with jealousy; Suzanne, well aware, was flirting with Mick in a way he could have put paid to with a few pithy words, except that he was supposed to keep Suzanne distracted until Jamie got back, and where the hell was Jamie anyway?

Shouldn’t have let him go running off to play James Bond on his own, Mick thought, while acknowledging ruefully that there was nothing else he could have done. He smiled at Suzanne—a little too hard, but she wouldn’t notice in the dim light—and choked on his screwdriver when she asked, a trifle too nonchalantly, “Have you been Jamie’s partner long?”

The coughing fit was merciful; by the time he recovered, and Suzanne was saying, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” he’d realized what she meant. She thought he and Jamie were lovers; her curiosity was prurient, not professional.

“You just surprised me,” he said. “I didn’t realize you . . . ” and as he hesitated, trying to decide what he ought to say, whether he ought to play along, or whether he ought to tell her about Jamie’s girlfriend, the image crashed into his mind, brutal as an SUV through plate glass—blood, black in lurid green light, and the harsh scent of cedar incense.

“Shit!” he said, setting his glass down hard enough to slop orange juice and vodka onto the table. “Jamie’s in trouble.”

Suzanne looked as if she couldn’t decide whether to be offended or alarmed. “What, are you psychic or something?”

“Yeah, actually. Three-latent-eight.”

She and her pretty boy stared at him with identical wide-eyed expressions.

“And I mean it,” Mick said. “Jamie is in serious trouble. Will you help me find him?”

“But where would he . . . ?” She twisted around, and only then seemed to realize that Jamie was not lurking anywhere nearby.

“
Fuck
,” Mick said between his teeth. But Jamie needed him, and he knew he’d never find his partner without help. He gambled on the truth. “We work for the BPI. We’re investigating the death of Brett Vincent, who was found out in Sunny Creek this morning.”

“BPI? Jamie Keller went to work for the
BPI
?”

Mick wondered tangentially what Jamie had been like when he had worked here, and if that was why he’d been so unhappy to come back. “Yeah.”

“And Brett?” Her eyes had gone even wider, and under her makeup, she’d gone pale. “Brett disappeared a week ago. Adler said he’d taken vacation, but Brett hadn’t said anything about it, and that’s not like him.”

“Jamie identified the body. It really was him.”

Suzanne thought a moment, her teeth worrying her lower lip, then turned to her pretty boy and snapped, “Give him your Cthulhu badge.”

“But, Suzanne—”

“Do it!”

Pouting, frightened, the boy unpinned the badge—black like the Inferno badge, but with
Cthulhu
written on it in lurid green black-letter.

“Trade,” Suzanne said. “Nobody wears both.”

Mick did so quickly, lucky to avoid stabbing himself to the bone with the pin.

“Good. Come on.”

“You don’t have a badge,” Mick said, getting up to follow her.

“I’ve worked here for years. They won’t stop me.”

Neither the bouncer at the top of the stairs, nor the bouncer at the bottom seemed at all inclined to argue with Suzanne. This was the job Jamie wouldn’t take, Mick remembered and showed his Cthulhu badge. The bouncer waved him on with no further interest, and Mick felt a pang at how completely Jamie would have been wasted on this job.

He got out, he reminded himself fiercely. And you’ll get him out again. Get him out and not come back.

Then he got his first good look at the Neon Cthulhu. Mick was no stranger to S&M, and although he was not himself a magic user—and had no desire to be—he had been trained to recognize the more esoteric byways of the various disciplines. But the Neon Cthulhu still rocked him back on his heels—almost literally—and it took him a moment to realize Suzanne looked as shocked as he felt. He remembered Jamie saying she didn’t know about the Neon Cthulhu, and it appeared that had been the truth.

“Stop looking like you’re about to puke,” he said, low and fierce. “C’mon, Suzanne. Pull yourself together.”

“God,” she said. “I mean, I knew it was a heavy scene down here, but—”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, resisting the urge to shake her. “Help me find Jamie, and then you can get the hell out of Dodge.”

“Okay.” She took a deep breath and said it again, more firmly, “Okay. But where . . . ”

Mick looked around, a quick, comprehensive glance. “That door,” he said, with a jerk of his head toward the only other door that had a man on guard. “Can you distract the bouncer for me?”

“Can I . . . ”

“For Jamie,” Mick amended hastily, and that seemed to steady her. She nodded. “Good. Then pretend like this is all part of your stage act, and let’s go.”

That got her spine straight and her face, finally, settled, and they stepped away from the door together.

Having gone through all the stages from raw newbie to elite inner circle at more than one goth club, Mick knew perfectly well that the second most obvious sign of a tyro—after the wide-eyed gape—was the overdone look of blasé nonchalance. The trick was to look appreciative but not shocked, and he could manage that if he pretended strenuously to himself that the occult signs and mutterings and bits of ritual were just exceptionally impressive window-dressing for the S&M scenes being enacted in cages and on altars at various points around the room. He also reminded himself that Jamie had said Electric Squidland had a license for public occultism, and thus nothing going on here was illegal.

They stopped by a cage in which an ecstatic young man was being flogged by an Asian woman whose long braids snapped around her like another set of whips, and Mick pretended interest while Suzanne sashayed over, all hips and sex appeal, and engaged the bouncer’s attention. Mick ghosted forward, aided by a sudden rapturous scream from the man in the cage that turned everybody’s head for a split-second. Then Mick was at the door, wrenching the knob with clammy fingers, and then he was through, the door closed behind him, feeling his way down a much darker staircase, the bite of the cedar incense almost enough to make him cough. And he knew Jamie was close.

He could hear voices; as he reached the bottom of the stairs, his eyes adjusting to the darkness, he realized that the stairs were masked from the room beyond by a curtain. Green-tinged light seeped around its edges, and he drew close enough to make the voices come clear.

“ . . . he must know something, or he wouldn’t be here!”

“Could’ve been just listening to the rumors again. You always were a gossip, weren’t you, Jamie boy?” A heavy thudding sound and a grunt: somebody had just kicked Jamie in the ribs. Mick’s hands clenched.

“He’s a threat, Adler,” the first voice insisted.

“And I’m going to deal with him.”

A beat of loaded silence, and the first voice said, appalled, “You’re not going to give him to Brett’s—!”

“I really don’t think it will care.” Adler sounded amused. “
He
certainly won’t. At least not for long.”

“We’re not ready,” the first voice said. “After last night . . . ”

“Oh, Jamie will keep. No one’s likely to come riding to
his
rescue.”

Wrong, asshole, Mick thought with considerable satisfaction, listening as Adler and the other man, now discussing logistics and supplies for what sounded like a very complicated ritual, moved away from the stairs, growing distant and more muffled, until finally, with the click of a closing door, they became inaudible entirely.

Mick pushed the curtain aside only enough to slip through. The room beyond would have seemed ordinary enough—a waiting room with benches and chairs along the wall—if it had not been for the terrible greenness of the light, and Jamie Keller lying like a foundered ship in the middle of the floor, wrists bound, ankles bound, mouth stopped with a ball gag that could have been borrowed from any of the scenes going on in the Neon Cthulhu’s main room.

There was blood on Jamie’s face—it looked like it was from his nose, and Mick was cursing Adler viciously under his breath as he dropped to his knees beside Jamie and fumbled at the buckle of the gag, trying not to pull Jamie’s already disordered braids, trying not to hurt him more than he’d already been hurt.

He eased the ball out of Jamie’s mouth, and Jamie took a deep, shuddering breath, and then another; Mick hadn’t been the only one with visions of asphyxiation. Then Jamie let his head roll back on the carpet as Mick started working on his wrists, and croaked, “How’d you find me?”

“Had a flash,” that being Jamie’s term for the times when Mick’s latent eight blindsided him.

“No shit?” Jamie sounded amazed and delighted, as if Mick had given him a birthday present he’d always wanted but never dared to ask for.

“Yeah,” Mick said, and the leather thong around Jamie’s wrists came loose. “But enough about me. What happened to you?”

“Being a Grade-A Prime fool, I walked slap into Mr. Henry Adler on my way back to the stairs.”

“On your way back?” Mick said, untying Jamie’s ankles. “Did you find out—”

“Yeah,” Jamie said, his voice tight with the pain of returning circulation. “Only let’s get out of here before we have Story Hour, if you don’t mind.”

“You could hardly have suggested anything I would mind less,” Mick said and braced himself to help Jamie up. Jamie was perfectly steady on his feet, and Mick hoped that meant he had not been hurt too badly, despite the blood. He was glad to let Jamie take the lead as they proceeded cautiously into a positive rabbit-warren of storerooms and access tunnels.

“You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike,” Mick quoted uneasily. “Where the hell are we going?”

“Back door. Heck of a lot easier than trying to get out the way we came.”

“And where’s it gonna get us? Atlanta?”

Jamie laughed, and Mick was ridiculously glad to hear it. “Alley in back of the Kroeger’s on Lichfield.”

“That’s three blocks away!”

“Halfway to Atlanta,” Jamie said dryly.

“Adler can’t own everything between here and there.”

“Steam tunnels. Hell, Mick, you know how this city is.
Everything
’s connected underground.”

“Fucking ghouls.” Much of the undercity of Babylon had been constructed in the late nineteenth century by a series of Reconstruction mayors who had preferred the local necromancers’ money—and at a choice between the necromancers and the carpetbaggers, Mick wasn’t entirely sure he blamed them—to the safety of their citizens. It was the ghouls, though, who kept those tunnels clear, as patient and industrious as moles.

“Works in our favor this time,” Jamie said, and a voice said in answer, “It might.”

Mick and Jamie both whipped around, and then Mick shied back, right into Jamie’s unyielding bulk. He might have screamed; later, he could not remember and could not bring himself to ask.

The thing that had crept into the corridor behind them had once been human. It might still be able to pass, to anyone except a clairvoyant, although the way Jamie’s arms tightened around Mick for a breath-stealing moment before letting him go suggested otherwise. Mick could see the broken wings it dragged behind itself, black as tar and shadows, and the way its eyes glowed fitfully sodium orange in the dim light. But the way its voice blurred and doubled, as if it were neither one person nor two, but perhaps one and a half—that, he thought, registered on the material plane, where Jamie could hear it just as well as he could.

And then there was the way it crawled, like a spider or a crab, and the fact that its legs ended in stumps where the ankle bones should have been; even if it could have passed for human, it could never have passed for normal.

Jamie said, his voice unnaturally steady, “You used to be Shawna Lafayette, didn’t you?”

“’Used to be’?” Mick said, hearing the shrillness of his own voice. “Then what the fuck is she now?”

“I am ifrit,” the thing said, its eyes flaring brilliantly, its voice warping and splintering, and it raised itself up like a cobra preparing to strike. Then it sank back again, the light in its eyes dulled. “And I think that, yes, this shell was once called Shawna. Much is lost.”

There were several thousand questions demanding to be asked, and Mick couldn’t find the words for any of them. Jamie cut straight to the heart of the matter: “What do you want?”

“I am hungry,” the ifrit said in a plaintive, unconvincing whine. “I am hungry, and I am tired, and I am starting to lose my grip on this shell. You carry pain with you. You could release it to me.” It licked its lips, not like a human being, but with the darting, flickering motion of a snake.

“No, thank you,” Jamie said. “I did figure out what they’re doing with the Neon Cthulhu, you know. You got all the pain—and all the sex—you ever gonna need.”

It hissed, again like a snake. “It would be better this way. Brighter.”

Mick suddenly figured out what they were talking about and lurched back into Jamie again.

“He is eager,” the ifrit said, its voice warbling with its own eagerness.

“
He
is scared out of his mind, thank you very much,” Mick snapped. “Jamie, what—”

“Shut up, Mick,” Jamie said, and very gently put him aside. “I have a better idea,” he said to the ifrit, advancing slowly. “Why don’t I help you let go of that body, before things get
really
ugly, and then you can go your way, and we can go ours?”

“Jamie—!”

“Shut
up
, Mick.”

“You will not kill this shell,” the ifrit said. “You know its name.” It sounded certain, but it had backed itself against the wall, and it was watching Jamie with wide unblinking eyes, very orange now.