The Blue Blazes (21 page)

It buys her time. She tries not to hurry, tries to focus and do it right. Skate on. Pulled tight. Laces taut.

The gobbos fan out. Walt’s just one man. They are legion.

He swipes at them. Throws bones that rebound off goblin heads.

But it doesn’t matter.

Because here they come.

Skelly doesn’t want to look. She closes her eyes and lurches forward. The skates work against her with the shifting pile beneath her, but it’s all she has.

She’s just lucky goblins aren’t tall.

Hands on hot, rubbery skin. A shriek beneath her. Her elbow connects with something–

When she opens her eyes, she sees no more goblins ahead of her.

All she sees is the downward slope of the heap.

She hits it with her head, and topples down the hill, head over feet, feet over head, end over end again and again – bones cracking her in the head, cutting her skin–

Something slashes her cheek–

Then a sting in her palm–

Green glow a swirl around her, everything a dizzying blur–

Until she lands at the bottom. Shoulder first, hard on stone. There’s a starburst of pain, but no time to think about that now. She scrabbles on hands and knees, more pain in her left hand–

The shattered ribcage of a small mammal has become embedded in her palm. Blood flows around dirty little bones.

It’s an absurd thought at a time like this but she thinks: I’m going to need some high-octane antibiotics to handle that.

She shakes her hand. The ribcage falls free, clatters on stone.

Ahead of her, goblins emerge from the shadows around the burn pile and into the light of a flickering green torch. It’s then she realizes many have faces reminiscent of human babies: fat cheeks and wet mouths, big eyes, wispy hair. But there the comparison ends. These are human infants by way of a demonic coupling, ashen skin and colored eyes, rotten teeth and egg-laying tongues. As they come closer, she gets her bearings, takes a deep breath…

Skelly screams.

And then she skates.

 

Werth sits upstairs in the foyer while Candlefly remains downstairs with the girl. The old goat drums his fingers on his lap. They’re really making friends with Nora Pearl, now? How will Mookie react to that? Werth isn’t sure how
he
feels about that. He’d just gotten used to thinking, OK, regime change, it’s sink or swim, fuck or walk, play or die
.
And now Candlefly is making eyes at the enemy? The little shit who killed Casimir Zoladski? How does that make a single fucking
mote
of sense?

“Don’t worry,” Candlefly had said. “I don’t trust her. One move and she’s done.”

“And Mookie?” Werth asked. “He gets to stay? We’ll give him a chance? Because I need him. He’s good people.” He neglected to add: and you don’t want him on your bad side, cause he’ll hit you like a goddamn cannonball.

“If Mookie wants in, he can have in,” Candlefly said. “Now make the call.” Then he handed Werth the phone and…

Now he’s upstairs. Waiting. Mookie will show. He has to.

Haversham paces nearby. “They’re going to give Pearl a chance?”

“That’s what Candlefly said. He’s gonna let him try to make nice. See if we can’t… all be a big family again.”

“We’ll never be a family again. We’re just a business.” Haversham stops. Stands and stares off at nothing. “Maybe that’s how it should’ve been all along.”

“Go to hell, Haversham. The Boss treated you like he was one of his own.”

“Yes, of course, I…”

“And…” Here Werth stands, hobbles over, keeps his voice low. “And Candlefly? He’s gonna treat us like resources. Like
employees
. And hey, speaking of the other ‘employees’, where are the other lieutenants in all of this? You try any of them?”

“I tried calling.”

“And?”

“I’m… not getting any answers.”

“Jesus. Not a one?”

“Not a one.”

“That isn’t good, Haversham.”

“I suspect…” Haversham’s voice trails.

“You suspect they’ve been put six feet under.”

“Liquidated is the word I was going to use.”

Werth rolls his eyes. “Of course it is. What about us? Are we going to be liquidated? Is that their plan for us? Jesus Christ, look what they did to Spall and Lutkevich. They’re not even… them anymore. Just Snakeface fuckfaces in disguise.”

“I don’t think so. It doesn’t make sense. We’re still here.”

“We are, at that.”

“Maybe we’re the new regime.”

Werth’s gut tightens. His body hurts. His
mind
hurts, too. “I hope so, Haversham. I really fucking hope so.”

 

Every part of her is electric with fear and aversion. Skelly’s brain has to work overtime to convince her body to cooperate, to barrel forward on a pair of roller skates through what may very well be the bowels of hell. This is the act of racing toward a cliff, of walking into a punch, of springing headlong into certain doom.

But she has no choice. Skate forward or die standing.

Only problem: she hasn’t skated in years. Skelly used to do derby. A lot of her girls still do. It’s part of their look. But that’s the thing. For her, these days it’s
just
aesthetic. The skates are hers, sure, but she’s been running a gang, not rollin’ around a flat track.

She’s out of practice.

And this ain’t no flat track. She doesn’t have her girl-pack with her. No jammers, no blockers, no pivot. She’s
fresh meat
here.

Soon as she starts to skate forward – toward the onrushing gobbos – the wheels bounce over a lip, a lip she realizes too late is part of the floor carvings, the massive stone etchings of monstrous worms and snakes winding around each mound of death. It jars her; she almost falls forward, but she twists her hips and leans into it, getting her skates beneath her–

And that’s when she realizes, those carvings are just what she needs.

They’re a smooth track.

Yes.
Yes
. As the goblins rush toward her, she reaches out her hand–

And catches the flickering green torch.

Soon as she meets the rushing goblins, she skates by them in an arc, swiping the torch across their faces and into their field of vision. They squeal and shriek. One launches himself at her with a rattling bike chain in hand but she ducks, feels the skate wheels hop the lip and land in the track of the carved floor–

Another twist and she stays in the track.

She rides the shape of the monster, winding around one heap and then another, the serpent tracks forming massive coils and knots around each–

There.
There
. The way out. An archway. Fire-lit. The arch a carving of eyeless worms whose flesh is marked with strange symbols.

Ahead, through the arch, the darkness shifts–

She thinks it’s just her eyes.
Skate, goddamnit, just skate
.

But then something emerges. A black shape, a reaper’s cloak without the reaper in it. It rushes toward her. She sees shiny eyes, like nickels catching light, hears the sound of blades scraping together–

In the derby, when you’re a blocker, you have to keep your center of gravity low so you don’t fall – and that gives you speed, too.

Skelly shrinks herself small, hunkering low as she blasts forward.

The reaper’s cloak flutters over her head.

Then through the archway.

Where the stone is no longer smooth.

The wheel hits rough-hewn stone. Clips on a crag. Skate-nose caught.

 

21

 

I have a dead man to lead the way. The undead of Daisypusher know this place better than most, almost like it’s intuition, or second nature – a nature born as they die. It suggests again to me that while the Underworld is a physical place, it resonates with the energies of death, creating a profound sympathetic bond between what we experience in our afterlife and the corporeal channels of this realm. Regardless, my guide is a dead man who has chosen the post-life name of Cerberus, not because he has three heads but rather, ironically, because he was killed by three dogs while trying to protect his daughter from their attack. She was mauled, sadly – lost fingers, needed some reconstruction of her jaw. But she lives while he dies. That is his mission, he said: to help after death to pay for the surgeries she yet needs and to make her life better even as his own is forfeit. We should all be so lucky to have so strong a mission in life or beyond it.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

 

He knows they see him. Mookie stands at the door. Knows now that there’s a camera pointed at him. This is it. This is his last moment to do differently. He tells himself, I could turn and run. Fuck the Organization. Fuck Werth. Hell with my daughter. She’s done me wrong too many times now, and I don’t owe her anything but the sight of my turned back.

But that’s not Mookie. What would he do on his own? Die on the vine like the last grape hanging, that’s what. His is a life defined by others. Whether it’s helping them, hurting them, or just plain doing what he’s told. He’s not the man running the machine. He’s just a rubber belt fed through hungry gears.

Before he does anything, he takes out his tin of Blue, presses a pad of cakey peacock powder between his fingers, and massages it into his temples. The horse-kick hits. A few chills after. Then it’s all melted butter and smooth jazz.

He opens the door and goes inside.

 

Mookie’s at the door
.
Barbarian at the gates
. Werth watches as Haversham ushers Mookie inside. Like a man leading a dire wolf in on a leash.

Mookie. With a heavy cleaver hanging at his hip in a sheath. And his beat-to-shit leather satchel dangling over his beefy shoulder.

Candlefly approaches from around the corner. Smiling. Hand extended.

Mookie sees him. But then looks past him.

Right at Werth.

The lip curl. The narrowed gaze. The popping knuckles. Hate waits hot in that gaze. He thinks I betrayed him, Werth thinks. Shit, maybe I did.

“Mr Pearl,” Candlefly says, his voice more
unctuous
than usual. He doesn’t wait for Mookie to return the handshake – Ernesto reaches right in, pushes his hand into Mookie’s gargantuan grip.

His eyes suddenly go wide.

Werth hears the grinding of knucklebones.

“You’ve got an impressive…” Candlefly’s head cranes on his neck. The pain in his wince is obvious. “Handshake.”

“Boss said it was how you got someone’s measure,” Mookie growls. “I wanted you to have my measure.”

“Consider it so.”

“My daughter.”

“–is downstairs.”

“You hurt her.”

“She
attacked
us.” A lie. Werth knows they sent people after her.

Candlefly tries to retrieve his hand. But Mookie doesn’t relinquish the man.

“Where’s the Boss?”

“Upstairs. Resting.
Recovering
.” Werth hears that and thinks: yeah, right.

“I want to see Nora.”

“Of course,” Candlefly says. “This way, please? Though, first you’ll have to… let go of my hand?”

Mookie says nothing, instead makes the sound in his chest of a tomb being opened. He finally lets go of Candlefly’s hand.

“Shall we?”

Candlefly heads toward the cellar steps.

Mookie walks after, once more giving Werth a look. In that look, Werth can practically see himself being torn limb-from-limb in the dark behind Mookie’s eye.

Werth gives him a nod. As if to say, “It’s OK”.

All Mookie does is bear his teeth like a rabid dog.

He follows the two of them downstairs, walking with Haversham.

 

Down into the wine cellar. Racks of wine necks and bottle bottoms. Barrels in the back. Warm lighting. Everything smells of wood and must and the faint sour tang of spilled wine. And there, in the middle, in a chair:

Nora.

Mookie pushes past Candlefly. He runs to her, drops to his knees. Cups her head in his hands. “You’re all right?”

She wrenches her head away, then gently pushes his hands away from her face.

“I’m fine,” she says.

He goggles at her. “You’re… not hurt. Or tied up.”

“Duh.”

“I don’t get it.” He turns. Gives a desperate look to the others, then back to Nora. “They hurt you.”

“Just a little.” She smiles, then tilts her neck to show off an already-healing wound.
A Snakeface bite
. “You got played, Daddy. It was the only way to get you here. Make you think I was in danger. You’d do anything for me, I said.”

“Nora–”

“There’s a new business arrangement. You’re at the bottom of it.”

“The hell?” Mookie doesn’t understand. All he knows is one sentence is tumbling through his head again and again: You got played, Daddy.

“I’m going to be your–”

Then: a sound. Off to Mookie’s left. A heel-scuff.

Nora’s gaze flits in that direction. Her eyes go wide. Then she looks right.

She mouths the word before she says it: “No. No!”

Suddenly her gaze locks with his and all she says is:

“Run!”

 

She hates him. That’s what she tells herself as he comes into that wine cellar like a beast led to slaughter. He was married to the mob. They were his family. Not her. Not Mom. And now…

And now here he stands, the poor dope about to have his manhood rubber-banded and sliced off by the very Organization to which he pledged his fealty–

That hate inside her rises hot and feels just. It tastes of sweet comeuppance.
You deserve this, you dick
. She’s old enough now to recognize that this is a teenage hate, the petulant hate of children for their parents, but it’s so deep-seated, so
integral
to who Nora is, she can’t help but take pleasure at it.

She thought everything had gone sideways. Casimir, dead. An attack on the Get-Em-Girls. The death of the Majestic Immortals. Then: she gets taken by a pair of Snakefaces to what she assumed was
the grave
. But Candlefly – the face of the
new
Organization, or so he said – offered her a new deal, instead.

Bring in your father and you can be his boss.

Then he clarified: His Keeper. His
Master
.

Some girls for Christmas want Barbie Dream Cars or ponies. Other girls want makeup, or a new cell phone, or hell, when she was 12 she wanted a pellet rifle (which she did not get). But now, all she wants is a collar around Mookie’s neck. And she wants to be the one holding the leash.

And that’s what she’s about to tell him.

She’s about to say, I’m going to be your boss. You’re going to be my little bitch. You’ll do everything I want. You’ll furnish me in Blue. You’ll kill anybody who gets in my way. You’ll get me a puppy for my birthday. You asshole.

Before she can say any of that, she sees the darkness move between wine racks.

A Snakeface assassin emerges – one of the killers who attacked her and brought her here. It’s the thin one, but the fat one is only a step behind.

And then off to the right is the third.

The one Candlefly calls “old friend”.

All of them, fangs out. Tentacles searching the air silently.

It’s then she realizes: they’re going to kill my father.

That’s when it all melts away. The anger. The hate. Like ice in the Devil’s mouth.

She doesn’t expect the word to come out of her, but there it is, screamed aloud, betraying everything she wanted, everything that she believes herself to be:

“Run!”

 

He didn’t see that coming.

The first thought that pops into Werth’s head as chaos takes hold is an oddly calm and quiet one: The little sociopathic bitch has a heart after all.
Buried somewhere under that glacier she calls a soul.

Then the thought is gone as it all goes to epic shit.

Nora screams for her father to run.

But Mookie does no such thing. He lurches to his feet. Puts his daughter at his back in a protective stance and stands tall as the first two Snakefaces close in.

The one that looks like Spall leaps – and meets Mookie’s thundercrack fist, head snapping back and shattering a bottle. Red wine spills like blood.

The other – Not-Lutkevich – tries to tackle Mookie from the side, but it’s like a dog hitting the side of a school bus: he thuds dully into the slab of meat that is Mookie Pearl, and Mookie picks him up and slams him down on his knee. Like a child breaking a twig over his leg. Lutkevich rolls to the ground, doubled over.

But Sorago–

Sorago’s
fast
.

He twists out of the way of a backhanded hammer-fist, comes up around and behind Mookie as if the laws of physics are no longer in service – fangs thrust forward, glistening.

They plunge into the back of Mookie’s neck.

Werth thinks, This is it, goddamn, Mookie’s down for the count, and he looks to Haversham, but Haversham is just staring, a bug-eyed fly-catcher who’s never been in the shit, who’s never been in the fray with bullets knocking splinters out of the doorframe inches from his head, who lives a life of spreadsheets and appointment books.

But Mookie isn’t done for. Not by a long shot.

The big sonofabitch spins. Sorago barely holds on with squirming tentacle-fingers, fangs still embedded in Mookie’s neck. The other two – Sirin and Sarnosh, Werth thinks their names are – lurch up, hissing, arcs of spat venom just missing Mookie’s face.

Mookie drives his hulking body backward. A rack topples. Glass shatters. Sorago drops, flailing.

Candlefly sees an opening.

Werth watches, horror-struck.

The man reaches into his suit.

Draws a small pistol. A Walther. Points it not at Mookie–

But at Nora. She rushes to meet him, a sudden glimpse of the father within the daughter, a feral tiger sprung free from its cage–

Candlefly clips her across the face with the gun. She hits the floor and rolls into a ball, clutching her cheek. He points the gun at her.

Then–

Mookie, now free of Sorago, slams into Candlefly. He drives him forward into another rack: bottles fall, thud, roll free. Candlefly tries to bring up the gun but Mookie knees him in the groin, grabs the man’s wrist and
twists
–

Snap
. Bright white bone spears – like sharp teeth,
Werth thinks – poke free from Candlefly’s wrist as the man cries out.

Mookie hefts Candlefly up by the throat, drives a cannonball fist into the man’s face –
boom
– just as Not-Spall’s fangs sink into the meaty back of Mookie’s neck.

Another hit. Candlefly’s face rocks back. Blood squirts from his nostrils.

Not-Lutkevich coils around Mookie’s leg–

Fangs sink into Mookie’s calf.

A third punch. Candlefly’s face looks like a package of ground chuck. A red, half-collapsed mess.

Now Sorago steps in.

The assassin doesn’t move swiftly. He stands up from the wreckage of a wine rack, dusts himself off. Werth watches the Snakeface stalk across the floor with confidence.

The Naga comes up behind Mookie like a shadow.

Werth thinks: Help him!

But help who? Which one?

Instead, he does nothing.

Sorago’s fangs again sink into the side of Mookie’s neck.

Mookie’s hand darts to his side. Grabs the cleaver there. Unhooks it from his belt, raises it up–

It hangs over Candlefly’s head. The Sword of Damocles. Swaying gently.

His arm drops to his side.

The cleaver drops to the floor. The corner of the blade
ka-chunks
into the wood and sticks there.

Candlefly’s breath comes as a ragged whistle through a ruined nose. Blood bubbles up from lips split and torn by his own now-loose teeth. He wipes his face across the sleeve of his suit, leaving a crimson streak on soft beige.

With his unbroken hand, Ernesto pushes gently on Mookie’s chest.

The big thug falls. The floor shakes. A lamp rattles.

Werth stands. Stock still, like any movement might be construed as a treachery against… someone, anyone. He doesn’t know what to do. Every part of him is paralyzed by indecision and uncertainty. His loyalty is flapping loose in the wind.

 

Blood on his fists. Rage in his heart. One of Candlefly’s teeth stuck in the meat around his knuckle. The poison runs through him, turning his blood to slush. Squeezing his muscles so hard they lock up tight and lose all sense of tension. He stands. Still awake. Still aware. But he can’t do anything. His mind is unmoored from the rest of him. His body adrift, a boat on an ocean without a sail or a rudder – him the captive captain, unable to command his ship. And then one more bite and no more punches and Candlefly wipes his messy face on his nice suit and puts one finger on Mookie’s chest and pushes. It doesn’t even feel like he’s falling. It feels like the world is lurching upward. Like the train next to you is drifting backward when really you’re the one moving forward.

The ground hurries up to meet him.

There, flat on his back. He sees Nora. Now up and crawling. The man, Candlefly, is yelling at his Snakeface friend – something about being slow, no hurry, while he was getting pummeled to a pulp. Then Haversham, that weak-kneed weasel, points to Nora and sounds a cry of alarm–