Get Blank (Fill in the Blank) (32 page)

A long driveway led back from the gate. The grounds were set around a circle and a cross, with a fountain in the middle of the cross and lawns in the slices. The figure at the center of the fountain could only be Anamadim, since there was no way anything else could possibly be that thin. She looked ready to snap apart in the first insistent gust, but she had remained intact. Most disturbing was the water, dripping from her mouth and slashes in her wrists to splash into the clean pool below. The grass was bermuda, possessing some of the thinnest blades there were. I knew from experience those sections of lawn were as soft as a bed.

The hill rose up a little more on our left, paralleled by the Anas’ high iron fence. Unlike the artificial landscaping inside the compound, the slope was the uniform dusty brown of the LA hills, a few shrubs tenaciously clinging on and fluttering in the wind. I climbed up onto this, following the land at a quick trot. I turned to find Heather easing her way up the path behind me.

“You might want to pick up the pace,” I said. “The Anas will be out any second. I basically just committed a hate crime on their lawn.”

She moved faster, the wheels turning in her head.

“Before you think about grabbing me, remember you have no ride, and you’re surrounded by your mortal enemies.” I paused. “Well, you will be. Give it a minute.”

“So I should grab you now?”

The front door to the temple opened and some of the monks wandered out into the sun. They did everything with a dazed expression, blinking a lot in the bright light. Their skin had paled with starvation, making the darker-skinned members look grayish, while the Caucasians turned almost translucent. The Anas were dressed in flowing white robes, their skeletal faces, hands, and bare feet the only flesh visible. Their hair was falling out in clumps, a badge they wore with pride. After all, they had defeated the human need to eat.

“Too late,” I said with a smirk.

They shuffled toward the gate slowly, clearly fighting the horror of being confronted by carbs.

“We have sixty pizzas? Thirty pepperoni, thirty sausage and mushroom?” asked one of the drivers, a baffled-looking teenager who must have thought he was about to be the protagonist of a Romero film.

 I swear one of the Anas hissed like a vampire seeing the sun. This is how rumors get started, people.

With the attention of the Anas in the yard, and likely the entire compound to boot, focused on the pizza delivery boys out front, I turned to the fence. It was formed from thin steel rods, pointed at the top, and painted white. Two horizontal bands of metal ran about a foot above the bottom and a foot below the top to connect the whole thing. It would be a rough climb any way I sliced it. The funny part was, back in school, I was the one who couldn’t scale the rope. Actually, at my school it was a steel pole, but I still couldn’t do it. I didn’t get used to climbing anything until I started this bizarre life and every other job took place behind a fence, on the second floor of a locked building, or on a rooftop of a CHUD-infested warehouse. I grabbed the posts of the fence and leaned back, trying to let my weight stick me onto the bars. For about the millionth time since I was five years old, I wished I were Spider-Man.

Heather might have actually
been
Spider-Man, because she was up that fence in a second. I hauled myself up and over, promptly lost my balance, and thumped heavily to the earth on the other side.

“Ow,” I said philosophically.

Heather landed gracefully next to me. “What now?”

I got up to find that a good bit of my black suit was now covered in yellow-brown hill dust. At the gate, the Anas were telling the pizza guys to get out of here in voices that sounded like they were trapped at the bottom of wells and asking for help. The pizza guys, probably at the end of their graveyard shift and now comfortable they weren’t dealing with the risen dead, angrily demanded payment.

“Back entrance. Stay away from the central temple. You’re thin, but to them you might as well be Vassily Zhukovsky,” I told Heather.

“Who?”

“The monster at the Satanist Church.”

“His life is ruled by anger.”

“Hard to argue with that.”

We circled into the backyard, where a free-standing garage was pressed into the corner of the property. Like everything else, it was painted a bright white and somehow managed to look like it actively repelled dirt.

I popped the lock on the back door effortlessly. This place had probably been a mansion at one point, bought and repurposed by the starvation goblin the Anas referred to as the Reverend Mother. As such, the room I had found myself in was most likely intended to be the kitchen. Kitchens, as any devotee of Anamadim would know, are blasphemous. The cupboards had been taken out of the walls, leaving bare patches decorated with very spare, very modern, art. The stove was gone and the gas lines had been carefully hidden with an end table featuring a fluted vase and a single slender orchid. The refrigerator was still there, and morbid curiosity caused me to open it.

Water. Bottles and bottles of it. All of the same brand too, Shining Spring, which was an Ana front. I’d done deliveries for them, and had once driven the tanker truck from the Hollywood Reservoir, where they stole the water, down to the bottling plant in Wilmington. Public water the Anas stole, later sold for a buck forty-nine a pop. Pretty good business model, that.

“What is this place?” Heather whispered.

“It’s hard and disturbing to explain. Come on.”

We went into a hallway. The left side was open, columns marking the border between a combination living room/place to sit silently and starve. Being extremely hungry myself, I thought the space was a restful place to feel this way. Very open, very airy, and nothing to remind one of food. Other than some shouting from the gate, the place was quiet.

I crept to one of the windows facing the front and peeked through. Three more Anas had joined the others and they were holding hands in a semicircle around the gate, singing a wispy incantation against hunger. The pizza guys were backing off, frightened. Less of the freaks behind the gate, and more because several sedans had pulled up to box the pizza delivery cars in. Large men in dark suits, their slicked hair shining in the sun, had gotten out. They were the ones shouting.

Satanists? If so, these weren’t the Sons, shadowing me from Wilshire Station. These guys were big and scary, with the sharp suits of paid assassins and the complicated goatees of Tony Stark. They really did look evil.

“What is it?” Heather whispered.

“New guests.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.” I wasn’t a fan of those three words, and considering the dues I’d paid, I shouldn’t have to say it about any group. Yet here I was doing exactly that. A year was a long time. Enough to get a whole city to turn on you, apparently. “Come on, the living quarters are this way.”

I led her over to the north wing of the mansion, where a staircase led up into a mirrored hall. A year ago, I’d seen a good length of this hallway shattered into a million pieces and I had only been able to escape because I had remembered that shoes were a thing. My assailant, the woman I was now hunting in her own home, had not. I couldn’t duplicate the glass-shattering trick—that had come courtesy of Mothman—but I had brought a killer of my own. Hopefully it would even out.

Everything in the hall, including the doors, was mirrored, and the damage from my previous visit had been repaired, like it never happened. Getting to the doorknobs was a little difficult, but I managed, even if I looked like a one-eyed man trying to give the T-1000 a handjob. I had no idea which cell Brady was in. Odds were good she was here, though, since in this place she was safe while she took out her former comrades one by one. I had to take the doors as they came, opening, peeking in, and closing one after the next. Most of the cells, bare rooms equipped with a cot and a few fashion magazines, were empty of people. Some held an Ana sleeping through her hunger pangs.

I was halfway down the hall when a door opened and Ingrid Brady stepped out. She was dressed in her g-man disguise, complete with wig and mustache. Her pale blue eyes widened when she saw me.

I advanced, Heather right behind me. “Hello there, Ingrid.”

Ingrid Brady recoiled, and in a frightened voice asked, “Why are you trying to kill me?”

IT WAS SO FAR FROM WHAT I EXPECTED
Brady to say when she slapped eyes on me, my brain was left groping for a response like a blind guy at an orgy.

Brady, regaining her equilibrium after only a moment of sheer horror, settled back into a kung fu pose, her hands quivering with—I hesitate to say fear, since I am only dangerous to things that have already been killed, properly seasoned, and lovingly cooked. Heather moved up next to me, watching Brady with open curiosity. In the mirrored hall, I could see every side of everyone, from the small gap at the back of the neck where Brady’s wig didn’t reach to the tag sticking up out of Heather’s skirt.

“You know, I was going to ask you the same thing,” I said to Brady.

“After you fake a rendezvous with one of my people and ambush me?”

“First off, ‘your people’? If VC was one of your people, why the fuck did you put a bullet in his head?”

“I never shot anyone except that ape of yours!”

Oh. Right. Elias. I wondered if he’d managed to get home. I wasn’t looking forward to talking to the Illuminati next time. How do you tell someone you lost their golem? There probably wasn’t a Hallmark card for that.

“He’s sort of immune to bullets. Common sense, too.”

“What do you want?”

“You killed Neil and Vassily.” I realized that sounded wrong, so I continued: “I’m not really mad about that last one. But the first one, yeah.”

“I never touched Greene. I only
tried
to kill Zhukovsky and then only after he came after Constantinescu. I knew I was next. I caught him up in the hills the other night while he was getting ready to execute someone. I put several clips into him, but that disgusting fat monstrosity wouldn’t go down.”

Oh. Ingrid Brady had saved my life. That was a weird thought to have.

“Then you didn’t frame Mina Duplessis?”

“No!”

“Don’t act shocked. You tried to have Vassily kill her.”

“On orders from the Reverend Mother! I never wanted to make a martyr out of that cow.”

I took an involuntary step forward, raising my arm. I’m not a violent guy, but calling Mina a cow made me want to hit Brady on so many levels it was irresistible. The problem is, I’m so unused to committing any kind of violence, I had no idea what sort of fist I should make, and ended up with this loose devil-horns kind of gesture. Here’s the weird thing: she flinched. Brady
flinched
. This is the woman who, when we tussled in this very hallway last year, rolled me up with all the methodical brutality of Anderson Silva fighting Dennis Nedry. It was like a fight between Ryu and Frogger. She was Bruce Lee and I was every Chinese guy in 1972. I had been mercilessly beaten down and would probably have been killed had not Mothman bailed me out. And here Brady was, flinching.

“You’re telling the truth? You didn’t kill any of your old cronies? You haven’t tried to kill me?” I asked.

She looked at the cocked hand and flinched again, like the devil horns were really intimidating. Maybe she wasn’t a metal fan. “No! I swear! We can even call that first hit and your ambush of the handoff even.”

“Ambush?”

“At the golf course.”

“Those weren’t my people. I thought those were your people.”

She shook her head. “Then you aren’t going to kill me?”

It was probably silly, but I had to know. “Why are you so afraid of me?”

“Because you’re a wizard!”

Sometimes a sentence can hit with more force than the punch of a trained martial artist. I might even have staggered. I was caught somewhere between laughter and total bafflement. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I heard you.”

“I’ve seen what you can do. You shattered these mirrors with the force of your mind. Then Burt Shaw went after you—Burt Shaw, an agent with forty years of experience. Real Cold War experience. He went after you and just vanished. The agents who came back from that night told some weird stories. I know what you can do, and I promise if you just let me live, you’ll never hear from me again.”

“Uh... huh.”

My mind was reeling from my latest hypothesis getting completely unwound in front of me. I tried to find another explanation of what the hell was going on and realized I had no hope of it in the high-stress situation I was in. I was going to have to talk to the woman who, until moments ago, I had thought of as my arch-enemy. My Magneto, my Joker, my Larry Bird.

“Listen, Ingrid, I have no interest in hurting you. Assuming you continue your policy of not killing Mina and Oana, that is. And you stop that Quackenbush bullshit with the fascist dictators down south.”

“Agreed,” she said quickly, nodding to emphasize just how important this was to her.

Right then, the distinctive pop of gunfire came from the front gate.

And then there was the click that came maybe an inch behind me. In the mirror, I saw Heather holding a pistol to my head. “All right,” she said, beaming happily, “you talked to her. Now it’s time for you to come with me.”

“Would it help if I told you she technically works for Quackenbush Security?” I asked, pointing to Brady.

“Actually, I worked through Shaw. After you killed him, there was a purge. I barely survived.”

“Seriously? You couldn’t lie to the crazy woman with a gun for five minutes?”

Heather sniffed, the tears already beading in the corners of her eyes. “I really wish everyone would stop calling me crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m the sanest person you know! I’ve learned all of Dr. Wood’s lessons! I’ve mastered his technosis! I’ve—”

She didn’t get out the rest because Brady, in a blur of cheap cologne, was on her. She grabbed the wrist of Heather’s gun hand. The pistol went off, deafening in the hallway, and we were showered with little bits of glass from the ceiling. That was the only shot she got. Brady twisted Heather’s arm, sending the gun skittering away across the floor, where I picked it up. Brady popped an elbow into Heather’s temple, tossed her over a hip into the floor, and slammed a fist into Heather’s jaw. The Rosicrusophist killer was out in under five seconds.