Fire Season Read online

  Enter the wind. The spirit of the Santa Ana winds, actually. While I’m trying to figure out how to get a speedy divorce before I turn into a lawn ornament, I find myself needing some help, and they’re the best shot I have. They help me find a guy I’m looking for, and I give them . . . something weird. They want me to burn my home down. I was squatting in a rancid, little rat trap at the time, so what do I care? Sure. No problem.

  Except they don’t mean my home. They mean the King of the Dead’s home. They mean Mictlan. Whole goddamn place. And why is that? Because all the wind spirits are connected. The spirit of the Santa Anas connects to the Chinook in Alaska to the Abrolhos in Brazil to the Zonda in Argentina and on and on, and eventually to a half-dead Aztec wind god, named—surprise!—Quetzalcoatl.

  He gives me this spiffy Zippo that holds the fire of the god Xiuhtecuhtli. It could burn anything in the mortal world in no time flat and all of Mictlan with one flick of the wheel. I tried it out on a creepy little island outside Mexico City filled with the trapped ghosts of murdered children.

  Since I’m heading down to Mictlan to divorce my death goddess wife and take out her jade statue ex-husband with extreme prejudice, it sounds like a win-win to me. Only it isn’t. Because burning Mictlan, I find out, means destroying the thousands of souls calling it their afterlife. I’m a bastard, but I’m not that big a bastard. Mictlan stays unburned. In the kerfuffle between me, Santa Muerte and her husband, I lose the lighter.

  After seeing what happened to the house in West Adams I know for sure the lighter is back in play, and I can only think of one guy who’d try using it.

  I’ve been waiting for Quetzalcoatl to show his face and burn shit down ever since I got back from Mictlan. He couldn’t have come at a better time for it. Triple digit temps, high winds, everything dry as kindling.

  As the man says, the hills of Los Angeles are burning. The palm trees haven’t turned into candles in the murder wind, yet, but it’s just a matter of time. Brushfires spread through the green spaces like syphilis through a Victorian dockside. Laurel Canyon, Calabasas, Verdugo Mountains, La Crescenta, Griffith Park. No matter how many firefighters and tanker planes they throw at them, they can barely contain the fires.

  Outside it’s well on its way to a hundred. I’ve rolled up my shirtsleeves, left my suit coat in the car. Some places it would feel weird with so many of my tats showing, but in L.A. they just figure I’m some white hipster from Silver Lake with too much money. All I need now is a fancy mustache and artisanal toast.

  I stop on the sidewalk to look back at the house, streaks of soot radiating out onto the cement from the house’s blackened lawn, crawling up the trunk of a palm tree. There isn’t much left of the house to tear down. Exposed framing, disintegrated drywall.

  Xiuhtecuhtli’s fire really did a number on it. Surprisingly, it didn’t catch the houses on either side. Was that on purpose? And if it was, why this house in particular? Why this woman? It can’t be random. Q’s batshit crazy, even by god standards, but I don’t think he’s stupid. He’s got a reason even if I don’t know what it is.

  I’m so preoccupied trying to puzzle out what’s going on that I almost don’t feel the flare of magic on my skin from the protection spells in my tattoos. Less than a second later I hear the gunshot behind me. The magic pushes the bullet away, but not enough. It rips my sleeve and runs a gouge across my left bicep.

  I wonder who I’ve pissed off this time.

  Chapter 2

  I bolt for cover, the closest being my Cadillac Eldorado parked next to me. I get it between me and the shooter as three more rounds go off.

  They’re too high and punch into the side of a scorched palm tree in front of the house. The last time somebody shot me I was partly jade and I couldn’t feel it. Bullets just ricocheted off me. But now, Jesus. I’d forgotten how much this shit hurts.

  I pull my own gun, a Browning Hi-Power covered in Nazi Waffen marks. It’s an ugly piece of hardware and I always feel like I’m shoving my hand into a barrel of cockroaches when I pick it up. It’s filled with all the hatred and nastiness from the war and I can tap into that with my own magic, making a .357 look like a popgun.

  I look under the car and see the shooter’s feet as he starts running toward me. More gunshots, more misses. One of them punches through the driver’s side door of the Caddy and dents the steel on the passenger side.

  Sonofabitch. Shoot at me all you like. I’m used to it. Shoot my car? Fuck you.

  The Browning likes to shoot people, and I can feel it pulling at me to pop this guy in the head. Somebody else might listen to it, but I’ve had years of practice at telling it to fuck off. I decide to do something a little less final.

  Magic’s like improvisational cooking. But instead of spices, you’re using bits and pieces of negotiated reality. Mages don’t throw fireballs. They collect oxygen into a sphere, give it some spin, heat it up until it burns, tell gravity to fuck itself, and then shoot that bastard across the room.

  In this case, reality and I have a conversation about loosening the binding of pavement, liquefying tar, stretching a little pocket of the world like it’s taffy. This all happens in less than a second.

  I shouldn’t be doing this to a normal, but if it’s that or putting giant holes in his head, this is probably the better way to go. I slam my hand onto the street and let the spell loose, the magic bending the world around me. Thick ropes of pavement leap out of the street and wrap around the shooter’s legs. His yell of surprise turns into one of pain as everything just below the knee stops moving and everything above keeps going.

  Including the gun, which is the important part. It skitters across the street, stopping at the curb. I step out from behind the Cadillac, the Browning in my hand and . . .

  It’s a kid.

  Late teens, early twenties at most. Rumpled shirt, stained pants. He clearly hasn’t slept, hasn’t shaved. Everything about him is haggard and raw.

  He looks an awful lot like the ghost I’ve been watching all morning. His eyes are filled with rage. I know that look. I wore it myself when I killed the man who murdered my parents. Dragged him screaming across the veil and fed him to ghosts. If that was his mom in there I’m not surprised.

  What is surprising is that he looks like he thinks I had something to do with it.

  He screams at me, tries to yank his legs out of the pavement. I’m too far away for him to be a threat, and I’m not about to get any closer. He struggles for a bit, but then exhaustion gets the better of him and he gives up, his whole body slouching in defeat. I put the Browning away. I get a strong sense that the gun feels disappointed. I’ve been getting that feeling a lot lately.

  “Fucking murderer,” the kid screams.

  If the gunfire doesn’t get the cops coming, his screaming like a maniac will. The street’s empty, and only a couple of cars are in driveways in the next block. That should give me a few minutes to figure out what the hell is going on without worrying about police.

  “Narrow that down a little for me. Who exactly do you think I’ve murdered?” I say, because let’s be honest, it’s not like he’s wrong. “Her? In the house? Who was she? Your mom? Sister? Aunt?”

  “So, you did do it,” he says. “You fucking murderer.”

  “Nope. Just saw her ghost. It’s kinda my thing.”

  “Yeah, I know all about you and your fucking army of the dead.”

  “I— What?”

  “They told me you killed her. Showed it to me. Told me all about you.”

  “Whoa, hang on. Who did what to the how now?”

  He gives me a smile that never reaches his eyes. That’s when it occurs to me then that I have made a tactical error. Mages don’t go running around with hats that say MAGIC BOY in big, neon letters. The only way we know that there’s another of us nearby is if they either fire off a spell or start pulling power from the environment.

/>   Magic collects in pools. Cities and towns have the most concentrated magic, people, events, the environment all mixing to give it a unique taste as individual as the city itself. But you’ll find it in the wild, too, if you know the right places. We can tap into it, draw some off if we don’t have enough of our own available for a spell.

  If you drink from the pool fast enough, another mage is going to feel it. Drink it in sips over a few minutes or longer and nobody’ll ever notice until you’re good and ready to use it. It’s an old trick. I’ve used it myself lots of times.

  I really should have seen it coming.

  Everything happens too fast. I feel the magic flare out from the kid like an explosion, warping the world around it as it spreads. The pavement I’ve wrapped around his legs uncoils. A thick sheet of it peels up from the street to create a six-foot-tall wall between us. Sharp, thin spears of asphalt a few inches long form out of the wall.

  I have a shield spell that I’ve used so often it’s become almost automatic. When the spears of asphalt forming in the wall shoot out at me, I’m already bringing it up. It catches most of them, but two get through. One screams so close past my head I can feel the air as it passes.

  I’m not as lucky with the other one. My protection tattoos push against it to slow it down, but not enough. A half-foot-long spear of compressed gravel and tar drives itself an inch into my left shoulder right next to the bullet graze.

  That little shit. The pain is blinding. I can feel the magic in my tattoos doing . . . something. I honestly can’t remember what half of them are for, but whatever they’re doing can’t be good.

  I use the shield as a battering ram, shoving it so hard against the pavement wall that it explodes in a cloud of dust and debris all over the street. Halfway down the block a car alarm goes off.

  I can feel him drawing more power from the pool. That and the pavement wall tells me he’s got skill but not a lot of his own power.

  Since any of us can tap it, I could start pulling some in, too. Then it turns into a race to see who can pull in more the fastest. I did that in Mexico with a Cartel mage, effectively shutting him out completely.

  But I haven’t tried it since. I had access to Mictlantecuhtli’s power then and could draw in a fuck-ton of magic in one shot. I don’t know if I can still do that, and now’s the wrong time to find out. If it turns out I can’t, then I’ll have wasted my time and given him an edge he doesn’t need.

  So instead I push the shield out toward him. I have more than enough power, to the point of not having to draw on the pool to maintain it. I can’t remember if I had that much before I was with Santa Muerte, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t.

  The shield reaches him, pulling in at the edges until I’ve got him in a bubble of force. Just as I finish wrapping it around he lets his spell loose.

  The inside of the bubble goes bright as thousands of red and purple arcs of power shoot out from him, hit the shield and ricochet back. It looks like watching a plasma globe on acid. Within a second there’s nothing but light.

  When it finally stops, and the globe clears, I see the kid collapsed, twitching, smoking. He doesn’t look too badly burned, but it’s clear that whatever he was trying for was lethal. I can feel him die right then and there, a tiny kick in the gut whenever someone nearby kicks the bucket. Yet one more side benefit of necromancy. Yay.

  I lower the shield and run to him. Anybody else I’d probably just let go, but come on, he’s just a kid. I try to remember how to do CPR. I’m not in the business of keeping people alive so it’s not like I ever paid much attention.

  I can feel the kid’s ghost starting to separate from him, and whatever’s left of his soul going wherever it needs to go. I’ve only felt this happen a few times before. Usually it all separates so fast it’s over before I even know it’s happening.

  I’ve always wondered if I could do something about it. Now’s as good a time as any to find out. I can’t do anything from this side besides watch this all happen. But over on the dead side I might have a chance.

  I will myself over to the other side, colors muting to midnight shades of blue and gray. There’s a rushing sound, like stepping through a waterfall. The city noises fade to a low, hissing wind. The cars on the street are missing, and some of the houses look different. Places leave a psychic footprint over here. With enough belief and history tied into a place or an object it’ll show up, regardless of what’s on the living side. There are whole buildings over here that were demolished decades ago.

  The kid’s ghost hasn’t pulled away from the rest of his soul much. It’s more like a slow peeling than a clean break. The kid’s body is visible, though if he were alive he’d just be an indistinct blob of light. But he’s still in the process of shedding his soul, so it’s right here.

  Neither piece, the ghost nor the soul, really looks like him, or even human. It’s too soon. They’re just ropes of white light splitting apart.

  I don’t have a lot of time. This is a land of entropy. I can already feel it pulling my energy away from me. Stay too long and I’ll be just as dead as anything else here. Though the ghosts will probably eat me first.

  The blood seeping out of my shoulder where the pavement arrow hit me (and there is a surprising amount of it) is already getting the attention of the local ghosts. They feed on life, and there’s a lot of life in blood. One of the reasons it’s used in so many rituals and spells to call and control the dead.

  They can see me from their side the same way I see them. Light and sound, but like a girl in a peep show booth, there’s no touching. To me they mostly look like half-formed nightmares, caught in a form inherited from their final moments of death. Gunshot wounds, cracked skulls, stabbings. To them I look like a gourmet meal stuck behind glass. And now I’m on their side of the window.

  This is probably a monumentally bad decision, but I’ve never been accused of making smart ones. I reach out with both hands, grabbing the kid’s ghost in one hand, and the soul in the other.

  My hands sting as if they’ve just been flash frozen, but I hold on tight. I pull the two pieces together. They fuse into one as soon as they come in contact with each other.

  Okay. Now what? This is brand new territory for me. I go with the first thing that pops in my head. I shove his soul into his body like I’m tamping down an overfull trash can.

  His body’s eyes and mouth snap open in shock, or terror, or something. But it clearly worked. He’s blurring and brightening, and soon all I can see is a man-sized form of shapeless light.

  The sound of Wanderers is getting closer. Though they look like they’re running, their feet never touch the ground. And if there’s a wall over here, they can’t go through it. They’re constrained by their own memories of how human bodies and the world work.

  Which is a good thing, because otherwise they’d probably be flying overhead and dive bombing me, instead of running at me like Labradors after I just rang the dinner bell.

  That’s my cue. The last thing I need is to get gnawed on by Wanderers. Just like coming in here, I have to will myself back to the other side. Used to be it took me a good twenty minutes to cast this spell. But I’ve done it so many times now I can do it in between heartbeats.

  I pull myself over just as I see the first running Wanderers round a corner. There’s that jet engine blast of sound, a searing light, and then I’m back on the living side.

  The kid’s gone. A silver Audi heads jerkily down the street, then straightens and picks up speed. I suppose motor control takes a minute to come back when you’re raised from the dead.

  I turn to run to the Cadillac, maybe I can catch him before he’s gone, but the burst of pain in my shoulder reminds me that I’ve got a fucking arrow in my arm.

  I limp over to the Cadillac, pull the pavement arrow out of my shoulder. I’m starting to get woozy. Can’t be from blood loss. Haven’t been bleeding enough y
et.

  My tattoos are still doing something. The hell did that kid do to me? I run through what I can remember of my tattoos and the only thing I can come up with is that it might be poison. That or demon brain worms. I really hope it’s poison.

  I slide into the driver’s seat, grab my suit jacket and tie it tight around my arm. It’s a shit job and I don’t know if it will do anything, but direct pressure’s all I’ve got until I can get somewhere safe. I don’t have time to do any kind of first aid. I can already hear sirens.

  I pull the Caddy away from the curb and round a corner just as the first cop car pulls up. The Caddy’s got some spells engraved in its frame to make the normals not pay attention to it. They’ll see it as any other car on the street, but it’s never going to seem out of place.

  Police aren’t usually more than a pain in the ass, but I need to get this arm dealt with. The wound’s bleeding pretty heavily. Hospital’s out. I don’t have time for questions there aren’t any good answers for.

  There’s only one place I can think of.

  Chapter 3

  I pull up to the warehouse gate just east of the L.A. River and honk the horn. My heart started hammering in my chest about ten minutes ago and I’m having trouble seeing straight. The wound in my shoulder is still bleeding, soaking through my shirt. I look like I’ve rolled around on a slaughterhouse killing floor. I really hope Gabriela knows a good back-alley doctor. Or better yet, a mage who’s a good back-alley doctor.

  Nobody comes out, so I lean on the horn again. They know I’m here. Gabriela keeps snipers on the top floor in case somebody gets through the gate. Normally she’s got three armed men in the parking lot, but today the lot’s empty.

  If nobody’s here, I’m in trouble. Of course, if there is anybody here I might still be in trouble. Gabriela’s one of the more stable mages I know, which isn’t saying much—mages and pragmatism aren’t something that usually go together. She might think it’s easier to let me bleed out in my car than it is to let me inside.