Broken Souls (20 page)

“We’re still gonna kill him, right?”

“Oh, fuck yes.”

Katya is fiddling with the padlock, yanking on it, hitting it with her hands. It’s not budging. She sees us at the end of the hallway, digs something out of her pocket. Another one of those goddamn paper charms? How many of those things does she have?

“You really don’t want to do that,” I yell.

“Don’t come any closer!” she screams. She looks crazier than on the train. “I’ll do it. And it—” She looks at the wadded up paper in her hand. “It will kill you.”

“You have no idea what that one does, do you? You honestly think it won’t fuck you up, too? Come on. Give it up and we’ll let you go.”

“The fuck we will,” Gabriela says and throws her machete. It zips through the air, helped along, no doubt with whatever charms she’s spelled into its blade. The second it leaves her hand, Katya tosses the paper charm. It’s a toss-up which hits first, the paper to the floor or the machete three inches deep through Katya’s skull. When the paper hits there’s that telltale flash, but instead of ice or a life-sucking wave of energy, nothing happens.

For about two seconds. Then the earthquake hits.

The whole building wrenches to one side. Cracks tear through the walls, the ceiling crumbles. A heavy shock bounces me off the wall as it throws Gabriela across the hallway. Huge cracks rip through the building, disintegrating the concrete beneath our feet. The floor opens up beneath me.

And I fall.

I come to in a pile of shattered concrete,
blink dust out of my eyes. Flickering light from busted fluorescents cast strobe shadows across the rubble. I can’t feel anything below my chest, which is probably a good thing, because I’ve got a two-foot length of rebar sticking through my left leg.

“Carter?” Gabriela says. It’s a supreme effort of will, but I finally twist my head around to look for her.

“I’m here,” I say. “You know, I really wish you hadn’t split her head open like a fuckin’ pumpkin up there.”

“You said you weren’t gonna kill her,” she says, closer, but I still can’t see her.

“Yeah. That’s what you say to a person when you don’t want them to set off a big goddamn spell. Not kill her. Jesus. What am I, an idiot? Of course I was gonna kill her. And who the fuck sets off an earthquake in Los Angeles? That’s just rude.” I cough, a thick, wet sound that ends in me spitting blood. That’s probably not good.

Gabriela crawls over a pile of rubble toward me. “Oh, shit.”

“What? My hair messed up?” The joke falls flat and she stares at me like she’s looking at new roadkill.

“You’re really fucked up, man. Can you move?”

I get my arms up underneath me and push myself to sitting. The pain from the gunshot is mostly pressure and though I can move my legs with a lot of difficulty, I can’t feel them. I don’t want to think about what that means.

“Sort of? How far did we fall?”

“Three? Four floors? I think we’re on the ground,” she says.

There’s a rumble nearby as debris shifts. Sergei and Katya pull themselves from the wreckage, their forms shifting in the flickering light. Sergei’s head and body are overflowing with bulbous tumors, blood and pus running from multiple ruptures in his skin. Katya has the machete firmly embedded in her skull. Neither of them seem particularly bothered by this.

“I think they broke the cage,” Gabriela says.

“What was your first clue?” The earthquake must have cracked the door, setting off the wards Vivian put on it. That would explain the tumors covering Sergei’s body.

Katya grasps the handle of the machete with both hands and wrenches it out of her forehead. Thick blood wells up from the wound and dribbles down her face. She flings the machete to the side with enough force to embed it into a concrete support.

“And they’re dead?” Gabriela says.

“I’m going with yes.” Sergei probably died of terminal cancer in seconds. And when the cage broke open, the demons trapped inside would have gotten out. With their bodies twisted into the frame of the cage they’d need new ones. Nice of Sergei and Katya to leave a couple lying around for them.

“We need to leave,” I say. I don’t know about Gabriela but between all the power I’ve used up just getting to this point and the fact that I can barely think straight from blood loss, I’m tapped. I can just make out the remains of a still-glowing exit sign behind us. I start to half limp, half drag my useless legs over the rubble toward it.

There’s a flash in my peripheral vision, a sudden blur of motion that spins by and then Katya’s in front of me, her face covered in rivulets of draining blood. She knocks me to the ground with a fist as hard as iron, slams Gabriela in the throat with an open palm, dropping her before she can get a spell off.

I try to stand, but I don’t get very far before Sergei grabs me by the throat and lifts me in the air. The eyes peeking through that mass of tumors are dead. Like all those skins he was taking, he’s become a suit of clothing for something else. I slap at him but there’s no strength in it. I pull in power from the local pool, but it’s too little, too late.

Gabriela lets loose from the ground with a gust of wind that blows Katya a good twenty feet across the remains of the room. She hits the wall hard, shakes it off like a dog shaking off water. Another blur of motion and Gabriela’s against a support beam, the demon’s hand white-knuckled around her throat.

My thoughts slide off each other like Teflon. I try to think of something, anything that can help. If Gabriela dies I’m one step behind her. Hell, I might be in front of her with how fucked up I am. If these demons don’t take me out, my injuries will. It would be really easy to just slip into nothing. To fade away and stop having to worry about demons and magic knives and death gods. It’s enticing. I like the idea. What the hell am I going to do anyway? There’s no way in hell I’m walking out of this building. So fuck it, I give up. Stick a fork in me, folks. I’m done.

But then that dark power hiding in my bones decides now’s a good time to remind me that it’s not necessarily my choice.

It flares inside me, spreading like cold fire through my veins, muscles, mind. Before there was pain, burning, a wrenching like I was being torn apart. This time it’s just the feeling of raw power flooding through me. I know this is a bad sign, but right now I’ve got more important things to take care of. The hole in my gut closes over, bones knit, organs and blood vessels seal. Each healed injury leaves a cold gap, not quite numb, not quite alive. All my wounds fill up with something that isn’t me.

I pull the rebar out of my thigh, shove it hard up through Sergei’s tumor-ridden throat. Blood and green pus ooze out of the wound. It doesn’t slow him down, of course. He’s already dead, but it’s pretty satisfying. I still can’t breathe from Sergei’s hand around my throat and I don’t know if he can kill me. Safer to assume that he can.

The last time I used this power I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t, not really, but I do know one trick. I grab his hand. The moment I touch him he starts to disintegrate like sand being washed away by the tide. He recoils, confusion and pain showing through those dead eyes. Flaps his arm, slaps at it to make it stop, but it doesn’t help. I leave him trying to put out a fire that isn’t there.

When I turn back to Gabriela she’s gotten out of Katya’s grip and is swinging a busted 2x4 at her. Katya yanks it out of her hand before it can connect. Seems that might have been the plan. Gabriela jumps back, snaps her fingers and the wood bursts into flame, spreading quickly up Katya’s arms. The room fills with the smell of burning hair and meat.

The grin on Gabriela’s face disappears just as quickly when she realizes the fire doesn’t seem to be bothering her. Katya throws the burning 2x4 aside and, fully engulfed in flames, takes a swing. Gabriela ducks under the fist, but gets a knee in her face for her trouble. I grab a hunk of concrete the size of a softball and lob it at Katya’s head. It hits hard enough to knock her over. Gabriela takes the hint, scrambles past her to the exit.

Katya sits on the floor, fire crawling over her skin, blackening it like barbecued chicken. Laughing. “I saw what you did,” she says. “It won’t help.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Worked great on him.”

“But can you destroy the rest of us?” A rising whisper grows behind me. I chance a glance over my shoulder. Shadows rising up out of the rubble like wisps of smoke. “Hundreds of us in that cage, wizard. Trapped for ten thousand years. Some of us will find bodies from the dead, but some of us are choosier.” She sniffs at the air like a bloodhound. “And I smell so many living right on the other side of that door.”

Gabriela’s crew, Sergei’s men, the police and firemen who have no doubt surrounded the place wondering what in the hell is going on in here. If those demons get out we’re all fucked. Even if I run around the room doing my destructo thing there is no way I’m going to hit them all, and even with Mictlantecuhtli’s power running through my veins it doesn’t mean they can’t kill me, or worse, possess me.

They need to be put back into a prison, and I think I know someplace that’ll fit the bill nicely. I don’t know how I do it the same way that I don’t know how I bend my leg, blink my eye, but I know it can be done, because I watched Mictlantecuhtli do it a few hours ago.

With a thought a hole tears open in the floor, belching out a smell of dry desert, desiccated rot. A powerful wind builds up around it, pulling up dirt, debris, concrete and rebar. The contents of the storage units, bicycles, furniture, scattered books, the random detritus of people’s lives, are swept up in that hurricane. Katya grabs hold of a jutting beam as the floor disappears beneath her, but the wind grabs her and yanks her down into the hole.

The pit extends around me, sucking everything in. I can see the shadowy forms of the freed demons trying to find some purchase, some surface to root to. A deafening roar fills the room as the wind pulls them down like water in a drain. I make sure every last one of them is shoved down that hole and then I close it up behind them with a thundering crash.

And then it ends. Silence. Nothing but Gabriela and I standing in an empty, bombed out room, scoured clean. “What did you do to them?” she says.

“Sent them all to Mictlan.” I think. Possibly just to Mictlantecuhtli’s tomb. Man, will he be pissed. I wonder if maybe I should have tossed a match down the hole, too. Start a fire to make the Santa Anas happy.

“And the knife?”

I pull it out of my coat pocket, show it to her. “I can’t give it back,” I say. “Not yet. That gonna be a problem?”

“Something tells me you’ve got a bigger claim to that thing right now than I do.”

“Thanks.” I slide it back into my pocket. “You want to get out of here?”

“I would love to.”

___

Getting past the cops turns out to be the easy part. The quake destroyed most of the building we were in and the shockwave nearly leveled the surrounding blocks. When we get out of the building most everyone’s been called away to deal with the fallout. There’s hardly anyone in the parking lot. A couple of don’t-look-at-me spells get us onto the street pretty quickly.

Santa Monica Boulevard is a mess of downed lines and burst pipes flooding the streets. Cars are flipped, power’s out. Dawn has lit the east with pink, but it’s still strange not to see the streetlights.

“I was gonna suggest we take my car,” I say, “but there doesn’t seem to be a street to drive it on.”

“I can walk if you can,” she says. “You can, right? You’re not gonna keel over now that everything’s over?”

I pull up my blood-covered shirt and look at the space where the bullet tore through. There’s no scarring, but the new skin is a deep green. I roll up my sleeve to look at the furrows where the ghosts tagged me. Same thing. The skin moves as I move, bending and shifting when I breathe. But when I touch it, it’s cold and hard. I tap it with a fingernail. It sounds like glass.

“What is that?”

“Jade,” I say.

“Do I want to know?”

“It’s a long story.” Fuck. I hadn’t wanted to believe Mictlantecuhtli, but it seems he’s right. I’m beginning to become him. His power, his condition. I have no idea how long it will be before I end up a jade statue sitting in some corner basement of Mictlan.

“We’re gonna be walking a while,” she says. “Think we got time for a long story.” Fair point. So I tell her. We walk for a long time, picking our way past the worst of the quake damage; holes in the pavement, cockeyed buildings on cracked foundations. News helicopters overhead are surveying the damage. Earthquakes are old hat for Angelenos, and though we see a few dozen skittish people waiting for the aftershocks, most are staying indoors, provided their buildings are still standing.

By the time I’m done talking we’re coming up on Sunset Boulevard. The damage isn’t as bad here. Signal lights have power, no downed lines. The flooding is limited to a couple of busted hydrants.

“And you’re sure this is going to happen to you?” Gabriela says. “That you’ll swap places with him?”

“No,” I say. “I trust him as far as I can spit a rat. But he’s been right about the jade. He’s right that I’ve got his power, even though it seems to have its own idea of when to show up.”

“Can you still do that thing? The hole to Mictlan?”

“Don’t know. I think it’s gone again. I feel . . . different when it’s happening, though this last time at least it didn’t hurt.” I remember him saying that was a bad sign.

“Well, good luck.” She stops at a Tercel that’s covered in a layer of concrete dust. “You want a ride or you want to find your own?”

“I’m good.” After dumping out everything that’s happened I’d rather spend some time alone to think about it.

“Okay.” She slides into the driver’s seat, starts the car with a touch of a finger. “Just one thing. And I think it’s something you should think about. Because it might change how you do things, how you look at things. I’m not saying that what’s happening to you is good or bad. I think it’s fucked up, but we both know that there’s shit out there that’s bigger than either one of us and sometimes we don’t get to pick the part we play in it.”

“You asking if I’m all right with this?”

“No. I’m asking if you’re still you. If you’re really swapping places with this guy, how sure are you that the choices you’re making are yours and not his?”

The question stops me. I thought I knew what I was when I left L.A. fifteen years ago, some punk kid trying to make things better, and that was wrong. And then I came back thinking I knew what I was, some cold professional who didn’t let his personal life get in the way, and that turned out to be wrong, too.