Flesh Circus Read online

  My knees didn’t falter, but it was damn close. Bright lights were on inside the house, starring the night. The neighbors didn’t come out to check, and I wondered how many of them had an idea about the backyard at this place, and the drumming that would go on all night sometimes. I could have had a homicide pair out here at this scene too, but really, what was the point? I knew where I had to go next.

  “He’s gone?”

  “Completely AWOL.”

  Goddammit. What do you want to bet he won’t end up a zombie too? “All right. See what you can do about getting the room repaired.”

  “I hate contractors,” he muttered. “Jill, I’m sorry. I was trying to get around into the driver’s side to get us away if we had to. I was just about to go.”

  That’s what I thought. I took a deep breath, watching the shadows of forensic techs in the living room, played against the bright golden windows. “Everything’s copacetic. First encounter with a zombie?”

  “Yeah. You know, no matter how many times you see weird shit, it always knocks the wind out of you.”

  Don’t I know it. But I didn’t really agree. It’s amazing what the human mind will accommodate, given a strong enough framework. And the training helps.

  Training made me think of Gilberto on my front step again. What would Saul do if the kid was still there? Ignore him, hopefully. And more hopefully, maybe the little gangbanger would have gone on his merry way.

  Still, he had the look. Which meant he was a problem I would have to solve soon.

  After, of course, I figured out who was attacking Cirque performers and strewing zombies all over. And after I figured out what Saul was—

  “Jill?” Avery sounded uncertain.

  “It certainly does,” I agreed. “See what you can do about that room, and if anything looks hinky during any exorcism, buzz me. Don’t even go on a call if it feels weird. Make sure Eva and the rest know that, too.”

  “Okay. Any idea what’s going on?”

  “Do you really want to know?” I took his silence for a negative answer and smothered a laugh. “I’ll be in touch.”

  I flipped Piper’s phone closed. It was time for God’s honest truth.

  I might not have looked very hard for the perpetrator if it had just been a couple Cirque performers dead, or just Lorelei. If black sorcerers and hellbreed were looking to off each other, it made my life a little easier. It was the chance they took when they signed up for their kinds of fun and games.

  But the hostage? If he ended up biting it, the Cirque would be stunned for a little while—and then the guarantee of their good behavior would be gone. And that was bad news for everyone. Even Perry, but while I could probably bank on his territorial jealousy, I couldn’t bank on him not deciding a certain level of chaos was a good thing for his plans.

  Whatever those plans were.

  And zombies, for Christ’s sake. Nobody needed to be unleashing carnivorous corpses on my city. I just hate that.

  Especially when it looked like the corpses were people being fed to loa in return for something big.

  I returned Piper’s phone, assured her again the bodies wouldn’t reassemble or otherwise even twitch, and realized I was there without a car. Oh, dammit.

  Fortunately, one of the black-and-whites could give me a ride to the barrio. I ignored the paling of the rookie’s face. It was the unfortunately-named Judy Garland, a smug trim blonde with a wide smile and a summa cum laude from the police academy. She would probably shape up to be a good administrator one of these days.

  After I finish their orientation, very few of them actually want to interact with me in any way. The slide show takes care of most of it, and the demonstrations—I used to do other things before Saul was around to change and show them something their brains couldn’t wrap around—did the rest. Most people’s interest in the paranormal only stretches far enough to cover a thrill or two, or some white-light bullshit.

  “Chesko, right off the freeway,” I told her. “Turn your lights on and get me there yesterday.”

  “Yes ma’am.” She sat bolt upright in the driver’s seat. It was her bad luck, partnerless for the night and showing up to help secure this scene. I tapped my fingers on my leather-clad knee, suddenly remembering how bad I must reek.

  Nothing like a zombie to clear the sinuses.

  “You can open a window if you need to.” I tried to sound a little gentler. “I must smell bad.”

  “It’s okay,” she lied, but cranked down her window halfway anyway. The night rushed in, full of city, concrete, and river. Red and blue strobes dappled the silent streets as we raced through over them, the shocks groaning. She was a good driver, but too slow. “Does this… this sort of thing happen a lot to you?”

  What, you mean zombies, or smelling like death and goop? “Often enough.”

  “You were bleeding.”

  I’ll bet I was. But it had stopped by now, or I would have used some healing sorcery on it. Another benefit to a hellbreed mark on my wrist. “Yeah, that happens too.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Fire away.” Only, how much do you want me to tell you?

  “We—I mean, some of us at the station, whenever your name comes up—” She was still pale, took a deep breath, and rushed on. “Why do you do this?”

  Well now, isn’t that an unanswerable question. “There’s nobody else to do it,” I said, and left it at that. I didn’t tell her what Mikhail said, and I didn’t tell her what I really thought.

  Idiots, Mikhail had often sneered. They think we do this for them. Is only one reason to do, milaya, and that is for to quiet the screaming in our own heads.

  He was right as far as it went—he always was. But sometimes, in the long dark reaches of the night when nothing much is happening and I patrol looking for trouble, I follow the logic out a bit further. I think becoming a hunter was preordained for me, but not in any Calvinist way.

  There was no grace to save me from these works.

  I slouched in the seat, weapons digging into my flesh as I shifted, and watched the city go by. She was doing at least thirty over the limit, and it was too goddamn slow.

  When I say it was preordained, I mean that there was nothing else for me to do but die in a snowbank, and I wasn’t ready for that. I’d reached the end of my normal life, and I was taken over the edge and into the nightside by Mikhail, for no reason I ever heard him explain. I never even considered doing something else, or taking the other bargain he offered me—therapy and a fresh start. The bargain offered to every apprentice.

  No, as soon as I figured out what he was doing, I wanted in. Or maybe not precisely. I just wanted to do what would make him proudest of me. I wanted to please him.

  I wanted to be worth whatever had made him pull me out of that snowdrift.

  I had probably been moving toward him—and this—all my short unhappy life. I could have taken a detour anywhere, I suppose. Free will means as much.

  But there’s free will, and then there’s being made in such a way that you can only do what you must. There’s no law against choosing a different path, and I suppose you could if you wanted to—but that isn’t how you’re made. It isn’t how you are.

  If the clay cuts the potter’s hand, who is to blame—the clay, or the Great Potter who created it? It was an old riddle, and one I was no closer to solving. I was as I’d been made, and I was doing what I was made for.

  It was as simple as that. And she wasn’t anyone who needed more of an answer from me.

  Maybe Saul does. We haven’t fought over this in a while. Maybe he’s just waiting for me to bring it up. He’s probably waiting for me to bring something up.

  We hit the freeway. It would take less than five minutes to get me to the Chesko exit, and then poor Judy could go back to her rounds. It would take me a short while to work around one edge of the barrio and get to Zamba’s, and the night was getting old.

  “Can I ask you something?” I stared out the windshield, w
atching traffic slide easily aside, pulling over. It was so much easier with a set of red and blue lights, instead of the usual intuition-tingling run through the streets.

  “Shoot,” Garland said, and probably wished she hadn’t.

  “Why do you do what you do?”

  I caught her momentary half-shrug. Was she wishing she hadn’t opened her mouth, or was she shrugging because she hadn’t thought about it?

  The road zoomed under the car. We were only a few feet above the concrete. Such a small distance.

  “I guess it’s what I was supposed to do,” she said finally. “There’s all sorts of reasons why people work this job. Too many for each person. Otherwise we’d be doing something else.” The exit loomed, she braked, and we began the long slow bleedoff up the hill. The barrio pulsed, and her radio crackled, squawking at us.

  The light at the head of the exit was green. She rolled to a stop, the reds and blues dappling the run-down gas station and the arching soar of the overpass. This far down Chesko she wouldn’t have to worry about her car getting shot at, and she could get right back on the freeway. It all worked out.

  “Exactly,” I said, and bailed out of the car, slamming the door behind me. I was already two blocks away, the scar tingling as I pulled etheric force through it, by the time her engine roused again. I didn’t look back.

  Exactly.

  The queen of the voodoo scene in Santa Luz lived in a ramshackle split-level on the edge of the barrio. The houses on either side were abandoned—nobody would stay in them long enough to pay rent or a mortgage. I often wonder if real estate agents have a clue why certain places don’t sell.

  The house had a three-car garage, an overgrown jungle garden full of spiny, smelly plants, and a zigzagging, cracked concrete walk up to the spindly porch, concrete stair-slabs laid in an iron framework that looked far too frail to hold them.

  I stood across the street, in the shadow of a closed-down convenience store with blind, boarded windows. The area hadn’t been so depressed and run-down last time I’d been through, but the edge of the barrio is a no-man’s-land. It was a wonder everything hadn’t been closed down before, but Zamba’s presence had given the place a facsimile of liveliness.

  Which brought up, again, the question of just what the hell was going on here now.

  The shadows drew close. The night was getting too old, and the streets had no cover. Even the barrio was winding down, its pulse taking on the tired thump of the long dark shoal of three to five A.M., when the old or the critically injured often slip over the edge into deeper darkness. When the parties are winding down, the bars are closing up, and people just want to get home.

  Of course, there’s also the people who just want to fuck someone up this time of night, too. But they’re easy to avoid, and if they haven’t caught anyone by this point, they’re probably not going to. This is the time when nightly fun and games switches over to alcohol and fatigue-related traffic fatalities and code blues, instead of domestic free-for-alls or substance-fueled fights.

  This is the time of night when the scar always turns hot and full, and I wonder if Perry’s thinking of me.

  It’s anyone’s guess.

  High wispy clouds scudded over my city, and the swelling moon played peek-a-boo. I watched Zamba’s house and thought about all this, breathing slowly, my pulse smooth and deep, silence drawn over me like a quilt. It smothered the little sounds that could give away my position—jingles of silver charms, the creak of leather, the subliminal sough of oxygen being taken in.

  That silence is the first thing an apprentice learns, and the most thoroughly applied lesson imaginable. Sometimes you’ll be deep in thought, and look up when you realize you’ve been making someone else uncomfortable. The quality of stillness in a hunter can verge on the uncanny.

  It never bothers Saul, though. And really, cats can be just as still.

  That was a distraction, and I didn’t need a distraction inside Zamba’s walls. That was officially a Very Bad Idea. The only Worse Idea was being distracted when dealing with Perry.

  It’s just a night for thoughts we’d rather not have, isn’t it, Jillybean. I breathed soft and easy, considering Zamba’s house. The peeling white split-level was completely dark. Blind windows watched the empty street.

  I checked the moonphase again. No festivals in this particular part of this particular month, at least none that I could pin down off the top of my head. There was no reason for Zamba’s house to be lit up, but there wasn’t any reason for it to be dead dark either. And she wouldn’t be a very good voodoo queen if she didn’t have an idea that something was going on and I was likely to show up.

  Then again, the sorcerous ability of a hunter usually means that you don’t see us before we show up to knock you on your lawbreaking ass.

  But I’d asked Galina to give her a ring.

  It was the umpteenth time tonight I was feeling hinky as hell. Either the successive shocks were making me jumpy, or it was thirteen o’clock around here.

  Although it’s always thirteen o’clock around Zamba. She’s been around as long as Mikhail has, and she’s always been the big power on the voodoo scene. If someone had taken her out and was messing with the Cirque as well…

  I eased out of cover. Crossed the street, trying not to feel like the house was watching me approach.

  Trying not to feel lured.

  The last time I’d been out to visit her, Saul had been with me. We were digging to the bottom of a case involving two particular black sorcerers who just happened to be her devotees. Zamba hadn’t been too happy about how that turned out—I got the feeling she’d been invested in their little rape and extortion stable, not to mention a profitable side-trade in the body parts for some of the, shall we say, less wholesome brand of sorcery you can tap as a bocor, the voodoo version of a black magician.

  I used to get all twitchy about the less-positive side of voodoo until Mikhail pointed out it wasn’t any different from people double-dealing each other in offices. The ambition of a bocor who sacrifices his friends and family is the same ambition that makes a workaholic cubicle-farmer double-deal his officemates and ignore or abuse his family. They’re the same thing; the only question is one of degree. I just deal with the people who leave broken bodies and souls instead of broken careers in their wake. Lives are ruined just as surely by either brand of troublemaker.

  And a good, fast, smart black sorcerer of any type can rise in the hierarchy of such things just like a conscienceless asshole can become a CEO. All it takes is the drive and the luck.

  Zamba hadn’t ever overtly gotten her hands dirty, and I hadn’t been able to press the point. But this was an entirely different piece of pie. If someone was operating without her knowledge, it was a threat to her primacy. I was hoping it was that—if she had a vested interest in keeping her position, this would go a lot easier. She was a scumbucket, but she was a useful one, and less dirty than Perry by an order of magnitude.

  If, on the other hand, the trouble started with her or one of her followers, we were looking at some serious unpleasantness. Best to get started on making it more unpleasant for her than for me.

  The concrete walk unreeled under my gliding feet. The rickety stairs didn’t move when I tested them, remembering the slip-sliding motion necessary to get up them without the rusted metal groaning and rubbing against the concrete slabs.

  I did tell Galina to give Zamba a call, tell her I’d be by to see her. So why is the house dark?

  I was too uneasy to ignore the way my nerves were twitching, pulled tight against each other. The sudden double sense—of being watched, and of ugliness about to happen—scraped me down to rawness in less than a second. I eased my right-hand gun out of its holster and breathed in, a long shallow inhale, poised on the steps.

  Wait a second. The sense of being watched was coming from behind me, not from the dark windows.

  I weighed the cost of looking over my shoulder. Was this a fakeout, or was something going on inside
Zamba’s house? Since Lorelei had just bit it, Zamba could be next. Or Melendez, or any of the larger fish in the Santa Luz voodoo-or-Santeria pool.

  This makes no fucking sense. I think that so often before a case jells, it’s a constant refrain. It just meant I wasn’t seeing the pattern yet.

  Between one blink and the next, I leapt forward, body stretching out. The stairs gave one howling groan as I pushed off, concrete squealing against iron framework, and my boots hit the door. Blue sparks crackled, an etheric strike as surely as a physical one, and the steel-reinforced door busted off its weakened hinges. I rode it all the way down, hitting with a hollow boom on the landing.

  Up or down? But the decision had already been made, because something was moving. I leapt up and to the side, catching a banister and propelling myself over, one boot-toe pushing and my left arm doing most of the work. This swung me neatly around, and I hit the ground in the living room, rolling. It was dark; she had blackout shades on the windows or something, for fuck’s sake.

  I hit furniture—felt like the edge of a couch—and something that ground under my coat, sharp edges slicing. One whole wall of Zamba’s living room was, if I recalled correctly, a multitiered altar to Ifa and several lesser orisha, built around a rock-walled fireplace. Drums should have been stacked against one wall, and the rest of the room should have been lined with furniture—two couches against the window, a long line of cushions for the lower-ranked devotees, and Zamba’s thronelike recliner with its back to the altar, wheeled in by a couple of strong young men at the beginning of every court-holding session.

  It was there, rolled to a stop on the floor with my eyes straining to pierce absolute blackness, that I remembered Zamba had a close personal relationship with the Twins. They had a whole quadrant on her main altar, and a private altar in her bedroom.

  Don’t ask how I know what’s in her bedroom. Like I said, last time I was here, things got iffy.

  My blue eye could get only confused images through a heavy, oppressive screen of etheric bruising. It was thick in here in more ways than one, a stench I was beginning to find all too familiar painting the back of my throat as I waited, full-length on the floor, hearing something shamble around in the living room.