Salt and Iron (2 page)

James lets Cutie undo his belt and fly, coax him out of his clothes, kneel, lay her cheek against his thigh. And James swore he wouldn’t do this, but he does it because he’s in love. He wishes he wasn’t in love, but there’s nothing he can do about it. Because it’s Gabe who makes his heart scrape the back of his breastbone raw with longing, and they’ve been friends their whole lives, and James fucks everything up, damned if he’s going to fuck that up too.

So this. So he slides his fingers into Cutie’s hair and whispers, “Gabe,” and when they’re on the bed together, he whispers, “Gabe,” like it means anything but a name, until he goes over the edge and Cutie squirms out from under him and twists around and smiles and says, “Mister Bourbon, you shouldn’t wait so long between meals. I’ve never seen anybody as hungry as you seem to be.”

He’d like to laugh, but he’s a tangled mix of sated thrumming and drunken dullness, and the pain that abated for just a minute there, it’s come back because the face that’s smiling at him now isn’t the face he wants to see.

“Maybe I shouldn’t,” he says, because Cutie’s good at what she does and she’s kind and she’s a professional, and there’s no need to be rude to the help. “You on contract here for a bit?” he asks, propping himself up on an elbow.

“Maybe,” she says. “If I get regular customers like you.”

“Yeah? Well maybe you’ll see me again.”

HE’S COMING
down the stairs when he hears raised voices. People are making a scene in the foyer, so of course they’re people James knows. He smiles down at the crowd by the door, at Bonnie’s scowling face, at the two guys who’ve made it through the vestibule to actually stand inside the brothel. He knows them both.

“Sorry, Bonnie,” James says, and he means it. She doesn’t need the shit he brings in with him. She’s good to him, and he’d like to be good to her. “Didn’t think work was going to follow me out the door. I’ll sort this out.”

“Be quick about it,” she says. “The law makes people nervous, even in a nice clean establishment like mine.”

“Understood, ma’am.”

She frowns at him and drifts away. James nods at the guys clustered in the doorway.

“What’s up, Rob?” he asks. “Mama missing me? This a search party? Did she tell you to check all the whorehouses from Cawdor to New Glamis?”

A couple of the guys behind Rob laugh. Everybody knows James is a joker. Rob glares at him, not impressed. So everything is as it ought to be.

“We got a call,” Rob says.

“Urgent?”

“Abraham says he wants you there. Witches,” he adds. “Out in the old Sweno place.”

“You coming or what?” the guy beside Rob asks.

James shrugs. “You know me. I’m in.”

Gabe grins.

BY THE
time they get there, they’re already late.

They pass a couple of people standing guard, Sam and Therese. They usually work with Gabe’s dad, which means this is serious business. He’s not here to help bust up some little ring of bathtub-potion-makers. With them are a couple of blues, actual cops in uniform, hanging out by the van. The old Sweno place hasn’t been occupied in years, maybe decades. The cracked pavement and the packed earth, scorched where teenagers build campfires and tell stories and try to scare the shit out of one another, are littered with garbage and still sending out daytime heat in waves. All that’s left in what was once probably a beautiful garden is the scraggly mint that’s trampled and wilting and perfuming the air as it dies.

One of the guys standing guard nods at James and grins, and James has a hunch he might be the guy who gave him the pills earlier in the evening, but he was pretty screwed up and he can’t remember. He pauses, lets the others go ahead of him.

“Hey, man, what was that?” he asks, vague enough that if he’s wrong he won’t embarrass himself.

The guy’s grin gets bigger. “I make it. Let me know if you want more.”

James nods, frowning. It took everything away, from the constant twist of anxiety in his belly to the weird shit his eyes sometimes do. He can’t really remember getting from the Firm to Bonnie’s either, excepting that Yuko drove him.

“Yeah,” he says, “I probably will.”

He trails in after the others. Inside, the foyer is huge and made bigger because the upper stories have collapsed and stand open to the sky. One room is still enclosed; it’s the old parlor on the river side of the house.

It’s cool in there, what with the proximity to moving water. All the windows have been blocked up with plywood sheeting, and the place would be dark, except somebody’s set up those lights mechanics use, the ones in little cages. They’re linked up with yellow and orange extension cords and strung like a garland along the wall. The place smells like mushrooms and dirt and fresh paint.

Three witches are standing against the wall by the time he comes in. There’s an old guy, with graying hair in a style about twenty years out of date and a rattish face, and two younger women who might be his daughters and who’ve done better in the looks department than their dad did. Benecio Marquez has already got all three of them cuffed in iron, so there’ll be no more magic here. Well, not from them, anyway. There’s a Thing, an evil, that’s always been part of the landscape here in New Glamis. James has never seen it, but rumor has it that both his mom and dad have. And maybe even the generation before. The Thing’s been here at least since the van Helsings settled here. At least, that’s how the story goes. It’s part of what makes New Glamis a hot location for magic, magicians, and the sidhe. It leaves pools of magic where it nests, and feeds big power into little witches. Like these.

There’s not much to the three witches here. They’re a little grubby and a little scratched up from their arrest, and they shift and twist where they stand, as if the iron burns them. They’re not sidhe or they’d be screaming, flesh on fire where the iron touches. It doesn’t burn, but all magic users have some sidhe in their blood, and it bothers them nonetheless.

He wonders a little about that. The fact is, he’s not so good with iron himself, and he wonders about it, like he wonders sometimes about the way the air seems to split and move like the mirage above a hot country road and other people say they can’t see it. Migraines is what he says now, when the shimmering gets bad. Migraines. Everybody knows he gets them, and nobody asks. Which is good, because he tries hard not to wonder too much about it. In those rare times when he’s being honest with himself, he knows what it means, so he avoids thinking about it. Right now he avoids thinking about it by looking around at other things, things that don’t shimmer like a heat wave.

There’s an altar in the middle of the room. Rob’s having a good look at that, already taking pictures with his phone for evidence, and Gabe has, after a quick hello to his dad and a glance at the witches, gone to stand over a carefully inscribed circle of salt and colored sand that lies like a carpet in the middle of the otherwise bare wood floor.

The circle’s pretty spectacular, neon-pink and yellow circles inside of circles, with salt patterns breaking through. James is so busy looking at it that he trips. Someone’s laid a broom across the threshold, and he didn’t notice it. Gabe looks up at him, comes over and takes his arm.

“Hey, you drunk?” he whispers.

James smiles at him. “Didn’t expect the broom,” he says. It’s true.

Gabe sniffs him. “But you are.”

“Gabe, c’mon. Where was I? I was in a brothel. Her name was Cutie, by the way. And she really is.”

Gabe rolls his eyes.

“So yeah, of course I’m drunk. I wasn’t expecting to have to work. I mean, not like this. Other work, yeah. I was kinda expecting to work most of the night.”

“You are a goddamned perv,” Gabe says with a tiny little smile, and James knows things are all right between them. “But seriously, be careful. These weren’t amateurs. That’s a hell of a salt circle. They were working some heavy-duty magic here. So don’t fucking trip into that, because if you do I don’t know what’ll happen to you, but it probably won’t be good.”

“Ten-four,” James says. He looks at the circle again. Big circle, multicolored, the sand almost lurid, the pattern almost like voodoo work but not quite. “You ever see something like that?”

“In those colors? No. But the incantation looks like it’s chronomaturgical. Can’t read it, though, so I figure it’s something homebrew.”

“Extra dangerous,” James says. “Got it.” He looks around. There’s a shimmer in the corner over where the workbench is, near Rob. He avoids looking at it by looking back at Gabe. “You know, it doesn’t really look like your dad needed an extra hand.” He nods over at Benecio and the witches. “He’s got it. We coulda all had the evening off.”

Gabe shrugs. “Three witches,” he says. “Your dad said it’d be a good idea to have all hands on deck, and he’s the boss.”

“He sure is.” James grunts. “Speaking of all hands, where’s my glorious brother?”

Gabe cracks a grin at him. “As opposed to the inglorious brother?”

“In my imagination, there’s a bigger family fuck-up than me out there. I just have to find him.”

Gabe laughs. “Abe’s arranging a new evidence locker. Go make yourself useful, Deadweight.” He gives James a playful shove. “Help Rob with the cleanup, and stop feeling sorry for yourself. You just got drunk and had sex. That’s supposed to make people happy.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

He picks his way carefully around the edge of the salt circle to where Rob is standing at a scored and paint-splashed workshop bench. Whatever he’s standing in front of is potent enough to be shaking the air like heat waves.

James knows this kind of thing personally and academically. Divination, particularly fixing time to destiny, is a specialty of his. This kind of shaking means a distortion in reality. It’s a place where time breaks and destiny is flapping around like a pair of pants on a washing line. The trouble is, the second he touches whatever it is that’s making time break like this, it’s going to stop flapping around, and you don’t have to have a PhD in divination to know that means time’s been fixed to
something
. The fact is, he’s a fixer; touching anything that’s mucking with destiny pins the destiny in place. It’s not something he wants to do, it’s not something he can control. It’s like leaving fingerprints on a glass, just a fact of life. He handles loose destiny and that’s that, for better or worse.

That little trick of his? That makes him every bit as much an aberration as the three witches who are currently being arrested, pierced with iron, and will probably end up shipped off to a labor camp in Alaska. So that’s a secret he’s going to take to his grave.

“Hey,” James calls, and Rob looks up, one hand suspended above the cards. “Yeah, maybe don’t touch those. Might be words on them. I don’t want you to get stuck and then have to read you out.”

Rob frowns faintly. “Thought you needed a whole book to put somebody under a spell. You think I could end up in thrall to a couple words?”

“If they make a picture in your head?” James asks. “Sure.”

“Sounds crazy,” Rob mutters. But he rubs one finger against the flattened bridge of his nose, which is something he only does when he’s nervous. “You think gloves would help with this kind of thing?”

James grins. “Reading” in the “reading-in” and “reading-out” sense is a bit on the esoteric side of things for Rob, who started off as a traffic cop and ended up in Special Operations and eventually got recruited by the Firm. “Yeah, no,” James says. “Not unless you put them over your eyes. Let your friendly neighborhood van Helsing do it.”

Rob shrugs and moves aside. “You nearly bailed coming through that door,” he says, his flattened face softened a bit by a wry smile. “You drunk again?”

“Still. And I just had this conversation with Gabe,” James says. “I’ll be careful, and it’s your fault I’m here like this, because I wouldn’t have come if you hadn’t picked me up. Plus I’m the only one who gets to deal with the hangover tomorrow, so stow it.”

Rob shrugs. “Didn’t realize work was such a goddamned imposition.”

“Actually, I’m glad you called me in,” James says, and he’s being honest. “It’s easier than having to read you out if you got read-in. And anyway, I was about done.”

“Okay, now you’ve gone from being friendly to sharing way too much information.”

James grins at him. He knows Rob’s not nearly as straitlaced as he likes to pretend. He’s not exactly sure what Rob’s hiding, but he’s very quiet about his personal life. If James were nosier, he’d find it irresistible.

“Bonnie Nettle runs a good shop,” James says, because he never could resist being an asshole. “You should try it sometime. It’s been years since I saw you stepping out with somebody. Getting laid would probably be good for you.”

“Yeah,” Rob says. “Thanks. Anyway, work?” He points to the workbench.

“You should probably turn around,” James says, and Rob nods and turns his back to the cards. James looks them over. “Tarot cards,” he says, shrugging. They’re not mass-produced fakes, either. They’re hot with magic. Totally screwing up the air above the workbench. He takes a long look at them before touching them. James has a habit. Well, not a habit exactly. James has a tendency to affect the things he touches, if those things are magical and tied to fate. He’s always done it, probably ever since he was a baby. Touch anything that’s not affixed to a certain destiny and boom, suddenly a destiny is confirmed. Might as well have been written in the stars. It’s not like he wants to do it, it’s not like he’s trying to do it, and it’s not like he hasn’t tried to learn how to stop. It’s just that, as far as he can tell, there’s not really a cure of that sort of thing. So he hesitates. Because destiny is flapping loose around those cards, and when he touches them, that’ll be that. A destiny will be fixed. Even if nobody else can see it, even if nobody else ever knows, James will.

After a moment, he touches them. There’s no other option. The cards are smooth and cool, standard size for a modern tarot deck, just a little larger than playing cards, but the deck is tiny. It’s been cut, or it’s incomplete. “Not playing with a full deck,” James says and then hears himself and adds, “Heh,” and Rob laughs faintly too.