Sacrifices (19 page)

“Similar to the symbols in the picture we gave you?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Elliot said, nodding enthusiastically.

“What does that mean?”

“The building burned to the ground a few months back. Oddly, nobody filed an insurance claim. I traced the ownership. It was owned by a company that's owned by another company that's owned by an offshore company that we're pretty sure belongs to Enoch Sobell.”

“So? Sobell's pretty well known for messing around with this stuff.”

“No, not this stuff. That's my point.
This
stuff is unusual,” she said, tapping the phone's surface for emphasis. “
This
stuff is related specifically to heretical sects and a very odd, practically extinct occult tradition.”

Heretical sects, a haunted church, and a priest. Something was coming together here. Karyn was damned if she knew what, but the outlines were emerging. “What do you know about it?”

Elliot shook her head. “Just what I said. I've got messages in to some people who might know more, but they weren't answering their phones at nine o'clock tonight.”

“I'll see what else we can dig up, if anything.” Karyn held out a hand. “So we have a deal, then.”

Elliot didn't take her hand. “I want Belial. Sobell too, if possible, but Belial is paramount. I'm not willing to compromise on that issue. As long as we're clear on that, this can work.”

“Good enough.”

Elliot shook her hand. It should have seemed superfluous after the steps the woman had already taken, but the gesture felt important, some kind of human grounding in all this cosmic baloney.

She just hoped Elliot wasn't about to screw her.

It probably wasn't
smart to be doing this alone, Anna thought. She wasn't at her best these days, and even if she had been, skulking around a neighborhood full of nervous, paranoid gangbangers would have been plenty dangerous. Doing it without backup bordered on suicidal, a fact she vaguely realized should bother her. Nail was busy, though, and she couldn't tolerate another night with Karyn staring at her or through her or whatever it was she did now, waiting for an eruption that never came.

She didn't have to put up with that here. Gant Street was quiet and mostly dark, the corners providing small islands of light with long stretches of shadow between. Nobody moving, nobody watching.

This is so dumb.
The thought merely brought a smile to her lips. This excursion brought back an illicit thrill of trespass that she'd thought had long since disappeared, and only part of it was the transgression itself—much of the thrill came from the risk. If she got in trouble here, there would be no help but her wits and her reflexes. It seemed like that might be fun, a straight adrenaline rush instead of all the complicated bullshit machinations of four different sets of criminals with at least as many agendas. Maybe more. She'd lost track.

She crossed in front of the diagram at the corner and gave it a friendly slap. It seemed to glow and shimmer, but that was most likely just the glossy paint reflecting the
streetlight. Something about the structure of the diagram sank hooks into her mind this time, though, and she stopped, stepping back to stare at it. It was a blueprint for a building she almost understood, or a simple circuit diagram whose purpose eluded her. But she almost grasped something . . . Pull out the fuse
here
, and the whole thing would stop working. Knock out the support there, and it would collapse.

Am I hostile? Am I the enemy?
The question announced itself in her mind with some urgency. Whatever else the diagram was, whatever else it did, it was a sentry of sorts. A spotter, perhaps, like one of the guys in Nail's old platoon, whose job it was to paint a target with a laser so that somebody else could blow it up. This thing would mark her as she went by, and she thought that later it just might blow her up, or help somebody else do the job. Genevieve was supposed to tell her about that, but she hadn't, and now Anna was beginning to get an intuitive grasp of the thing herself.

Not myself. Goddamn demon is feeding me answers.

Fine. Let it make itself useful.

She picked up a piece of broken glass, green, the Dos Equis label still clinging to it. She still couldn't fully comprehend the circuit in front of her, but the demon had shown her which fuse to remove to shut the thing down, at least insofar as it might affect her. Perhaps totally. Who knew? Who cared?

She slashed her palm (
the left palm,
a part of her insisted) and watched the blood well from the wound. Her stomach growled, but instead of lapping at the cut—or tearing at it—she smeared seven marks on the diagram on the wall, starting at the top and working her way around counterclockwise.
Widdershins,
she thought, and then:
What does that even mean?

She stepped back and admired her work. There was a timer attached to it, she thought, or at least she felt a sense that she should move, quickly, before . . . Before
something
.

But wait. I have blood.
It would be a shame to let that
vital ink dry without using it for something else. She thought of the work at hand and an idea came to her, beautiful in its simplicity. First, two marks, one on the back of each hand, each a semicircular symbol she didn't recognize and yet understood completely. Then she kicked off her boots. One fell on its side, and the other stood up, the top half drooping over forlornly. The sight struck her as funny, and she chuckled.

Two more marks, one on the top of each foot. She thought, crazily, of pulling up her shirt and making another mark in her side, but while part of her found that hysterically funny, it wouldn't help her any.

She got out her phone and, using the screen as a poor sort of mirror, drew one last symbol on her head. She became aware of a sound droning around her, and then realized without much surprise that it was her voice issuing a chant or incantation of some kind. A rush of pleasure accompanied the last word, a tingling that spread from her chest out to her extremities, and she gasped.

This
was what Karyn didn't want her doing.

Not just Karyn,
she thought.
I really shouldn't be doing this.
The thought was a whisper in a hurricane, difficult to hear, impossible to heed.

The streetlight above her blew out. Shadows tore themselves from doorways, from the undercarriage of a parked car, from every curb and gutter, a vast foul stinking black one from a storm drain, a faint and timid one from the streetlight itself. They flew toward her, inspiring an ecstasy of terror before they slid and slipped and entwined themselves around her body, thick streamers anchored at hands, feet, and forehead, curling about her in a shroud and reaching out like tentacles around her.

She looked down at her hand and saw nothing but a vague shape draped in shadow, like something barely glimpsed lurking at the back of an alley. She wasn't invisible, she didn't think, but the next best thing. Hidden, even standing out in the open on the sidewalk.

Holy shit. Where has this been for the last ten years? I've had to do everything the hard way all this time!

She walked into Locos territory, now paying no heed to the crippled diagram on the wall. Instead of keeping to the back streets and alleys, she walked down the sidewalk, marveling at how the edges of her coat of shadows merged with and pulled at other shadows around her, making it unclear where each ended. The effect, in the low light of midnight, was to make it seem that wherever she walked, there just happened to be a confluence of shadows masking her.

She made straight for the cemetery. Perhaps the priest would be there tonight, going about his morbid business. She could get close enough to watch, close enough to see everything.

She wondered whether the shadows would cling to her in a fight, hiding her from an opponent's view. Something told her they would. She itched to find out firsthand.

The floodlights outside Nuestra Señora blazed brightly, brighter than before, it seemed, sending burning, blinding rays out in all directions. She squinted and held up a hand—and saw her fingers through the shadow.

She turned around, slinking back behind the building. The shadows
weren't
impenetrable, then, and, as she ought to have suspected, she'd need to stay away from strong light sources. No problem, really. She went back down the street a couple of blocks, then ducked into an alley. Out the other side, she saw the cemetery fence. The church still blazed in the distance, but it was the cold, feeble brightness of stars rather than the searching laser it had seemed before. Distant. Harmless.

Anna walked to the fence, and the shadows thickened as the bulk of the church blocked most of the lights. Of course there were no lights back here—the priest wouldn't want that any more than she did.

Too bad for her that he wasn't here. The cemetery was silent, and nobody disturbed the graves tonight. Anna settled in to wait. He might not be coming tonight, but he might simply not have arrived yet. What had he said about his grave-robbing duties? “Do you think all that comes for free?” he'd asked, referring to hurting the
Locos' enemies. The Locos had a lot of enemies, and the grave-robbing fueled their defense in some way that Anna didn't understand. He'd be back, Anna assured herself, and probably soon.

She waited. No party livened up the street tonight. All was quiet. Boring, in fact. Anna tried to check her watch, only to find that she couldn't see it. It had a light, but turning it on didn't seem like the best idea right now.

A cat walked toward her. The shadows reached for it. It didn't hiss or spit, but it abruptly changed direction and crossed the street with a “That's where I was going anyway” strut common to cats everywhere.

How long had it been? It felt like about a week. Why wasn't anything going on down here? Where was the party? Where was the damn priest?

Anna forced herself to take a breath. She wasn't all that patient by nature, but she recognized that she was rushing by even her own standards. In reality, she had to have been here only a few minutes. She leaned forward, pressing her shoulders against the iron bars of the cemetery fence, and sighed.

She started counting, thinking she'd get to a thousand or so, then make a partial circuit of the cemetery, just to see, staying away from the lights out front. She made it to forty-three before she couldn't take it anymore. She walked to the right, bouncing her left hand off each bar of the fence with a muted tap.

That's stupid,
she realized after making it almost all the way to the corner. She put her hands in her pockets.

She saw nothing moving all the way to the corner, other than the damn cat curling up on somebody's doorstep. The emptiness felt strange to her, and only after she reminded herself that it was nearly one in the morning did the absence of people seem even somewhat understandable. The night fit her like a second skin, but that wasn't true for everyone.

At the corner, she paused. There really wasn't any point to walking all the way to the church. The graves that the priest had robbed were back here, and there
wasn't anything to see up there. Turning around seemed unthinkable, though, another taxing pointless exercise in testing her patience.

Fuck waiting.
So the priest wasn't here. Big deal. There were other people of interest in the neighborhood, and maybe of even greater interest than the priest. And it wasn't as if she'd even be abandoning her mission, really. It took a long time to dig a grave and fill it back up. She'd go check out Rogelio Moreno's place and see what she could learn there, and she'd easily be back in time to see if anything further was going on out here.

She was already moving, as though her feet had decided this was the correct course of action long before her mind reached the same conclusion. The idea that she wasn't doing her own thinking at the moment was unnerving, so she did her best to forget about it, and she walked a little faster.

Locos territory was almost ludicrously small, bordered by Gant Street on the southwest, First and Fourth Streets on the north- and southeast, and a staggered collection of small streets on the other side. Two blocks by four or five, with the church close to one of the ends. Rogelio Moreno's place, nestled in the middle, wasn't far. It was, in fact, probably the source of the noise from all the partying the other night.

Anna pulled her shadows close and crossed the street to put some distance between her and the floodlights as she walked past the church. God, the glare was awful. As she approached the end of the block, she realized it had nothing to do with the church. The sole streetlight here was also a beacon of blue-white agony that set up a screaming high-pitched ringing in her head, like somebody had just clouted her on the ear with a brick.
Magic side effect? Am I a fucking vampire now? What the hell is going on?
She wanted to call Genevieve, but this was neither the time nor the place, and besides, she was worried that unleashing the light from her phone at close range might be tantamount to stabbing herself in the forehead.

Back into the alley, then. She picked up speed, thinking to get to Moreno's house quickly, but she took a wrong
turn somewhere and her route ended up being more circuitous than planned. She was winded at the end of it, and she distantly wondered how she'd gotten so out of shape that walking a couple of blocks could make her so tired, but at least she'd gotten to the place. It was quiet. She'd expected the lights to be on and a bunch of noise issuing from inside, or at the very least a couple of kids with pistols camped on the front porch, but there was nothing of the kind. Dim light issued from a single window toward the back of the house, mercifully curtained so the worst of the glare didn't escape. Other than that, the place was dark and silent.

Anna went around the side. The window was open to let the relatively cool night air into the house, and voices floated out to her. Out of habit, she checked the street. She saw nobody—not, she thought, that it really mattered right now—and crept to the house, crouching beneath the window.

She heard a cupboard close. A moment later, there was the distinctive sound of a refrigerator opening, followed by the hiss as somebody cracked a beer. A chair scraped against linoleum, then creaked, and then a man sighed.

“We're fucked,” a man said. Moreno, Anna was sure. He sounded even more exhausted than he had a week ago, but his voice was unmistakable.

“God and all his angels are at your side,” a second man said. That was the priest. The cadence of his voice, and the slight, odd accent gave him away. Plus, who else would say shit like that?

“God and all his angels got no time for a bunch of cholos from East L.A., Padre. I appreciate you're trying to make this seem bigger than it is, but
you're
doing all the work here.”

“It's life or death, Rogelio. Salvation and destruction. Do I really need to try to make it seem any bigger than that?”

“No.” A pause, during which Anna heard nothing. “There's nineteen of us, and four gangs want to crush us between 'em. Nineteen, and eight of 'em are kids. Two little girls, for Christ's sake.”

“I know.”

“You're working miracles here, but I don't know how long even you can keep this up. And I'm . . . I'm getting tired.” The strain in his voice, the hesitation—was he
weeping
in there?

“Your heart is in the right place,” the priest said. “I know that. You just need the will to keep going. I can help you with that.”