figure if we let them out of their cages they’ll hightail it out of there.”
“Maybe, but something is holding them. They don’t try to escape. They don’t try to leave the dogfighting ring. Some of them probably aren’t in very good shape. It might not be as simple as just opening the cages.”
“Well, what’s holding them, then? It doesn’t do much good to poke holes in my plan unless you have a better idea.” Right about then, my cell phone beeped. I had a text message. the elegant skull turns the center a dead stone in the city of smoke cages of old sorrow and torn memory death’s lightness bound in brittle spite
“What is it?” Adan asked when I finished reading.
“Someone’s telling me we need to clip La Calavera,” I said. “She’s holding them there, somehow. It doesn’t really matter how-if we take her out, we’ll be able to free the Xolos. So we hit the place after dark, when the vampires are on this side, but before La Calavera heads out for a night on the town.”
“Who sent the text?” Honey asked.
I checked the call log but the number was listed as “Unknown.”
“Could be three Pakistani women in federal custody,” I said. “Could be Hecate.”
“The goddess?”
“That’s what the Feds call her.”
“A goddess is sending you text messages?”
“I don’t know it’s a goddess. It’s like a signal in the ectoplasmic flow.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, Domino,” Honey said. “What the hell is an ectoplasmic flow?”
“Magic. It’s what the government nerds call magic. Look, it’s hard to explain. I don’t know what Hecate is. I don’t know why it’s sending me text messages.”
“But whatever it is, it’s telling you to kill La Calavera, so that’s what you’re going to do.”
“It’s not telling me that, exactly. ‘The elegant skull turns the center.’”
“It’s gibberish,” Honey said.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought at first, too. But it was right about the Xolos.”
“It told you about the Xolos?”
“Sort of. ‘Claimant and messenger, lost. Stone circle, grasping the harmonic motion.’ Hey, the stone circle bit could be talking about the dogfighting pit.”
“What’s a harmonic motion?”
“I don’t remember. Something about a pendulum, maybe.”
“It’s gibberish, Domino!”
“What about ‘death’s lightness bound in brittle spite’?” I said. “It’s clearly talking about the Xolos and how La Calavera has them bound in her…brittle spite.”
Honey arched an eyebrow and looked at me.
Adan spoke up. “Even if we can’t be sure about the reliability of the intelligence,” he said, “it’s still not a bad plan. Maybe killing La Calavera won’t free the Xolos, but freeing them will be easier with her out of the way.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking at the cell phone screen. “She’s a ‘dead stone in the city of smoke.’”
“That could be a reference to the Pink Palace,” Adan said, looking over my shoulder. “Or it could be talking about the dogfighting pits again.”
“Why is it mortal sorcerers are always so eager to swallow anything some old spirit dishes up?” Honey said.
“They’re gullible,” Jack said, and shrugged.
I looked at them and scowled. “Spirits aren’t always lying, Honey,” I said. It was mean, but I was losing patience with all the second-guessing.
“Only when our lips are moving,” said Jack, grinning. She probably hadn’t told him about our history. Not all of it, anyway. Not the part about how she’d lied to me, betrayed me, to protect her family.
“Some spirits are your friends, Domino,” Honey said softly. “You don’t even know what this one is or what it wants.”
Now she was going to guilt-trip me. I probably had it coming. I smiled at her and nodded. “I’m not going to trust this Hecate-or whatever it is-like I trust my friends. Maybe it’s playing an angle. It makes sense to hit La Calavera either way.”
“It’s like deja vu, Domino,” Honey said. “This spirit may not be that easy to kill. And you still can’t fight worth a damn in the Between.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But this time we’ve got Adan and Jack backing us up.”
“How do you want to do it?” Adan said, walking over to the Pink Palace.
“The gangster way,” I said. “We’re not going to assault the castle, Adan. You want to hit a guy, you wait until he comes out and you gun him down on his front porch or in the street.” Actually, nine times out of ten when you clipped a guy it was someone you knew, probably someone in your own outfit. Getting close wasn’t a problem. This wasn’t that kind of situation. I pointed to the front wall of the estate where the private driveway opened onto the street. “I think we wait for her here, at the gate. There are no cars, so she’ll come out on foot when she goes to the club.”
Adan nodded. “Like the vodyanoy. I like this terrain better. More places to hide.”
“And no ocean to worry about,” I said. “We just have to put her down before she can get into the mist.”
“All this scheming and plotting and ambushing,” Jack said. “It reminds me of Avalon.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not a knight in shining armor, Jack. I’m a gangster.”
The piskie shook his head. “That is only a choice. To fight with honor-that is also a choice.”
“Weren’t you an assassin, Jack? Seems like you wouldn’t have any objection to a nice ambush.”
Jack shrugged. “Sometimes assassination is the right choice.”
“Exactly. My choice is whichever way is most likely to end up with La Calavera dead. Honor isn’t going to set the Xolos free.”
Jack just shrugged again, having apparently run out of words, but Adan picked up the argument. “Are you sure, Domino?” he said. “The Between isn’t Arcadia. La Calavera’s evil binds the Xolos to that place. We don’t know exactly how. It may be necessary to defeat that evil, to challenge it, confront it, and ultimately to overcome it, in order to free the Xolos. Ambushing the spirit at the front gate may not break that evil spell-it may only feed it.”
“So what am I supposed to do exactly? Call her out for a showdown at high noon on Sunset Boulevard?”
“No, we should still wait for sundown,” Honey said. “If the fight doesn’t go her way, she’ll double-cross us. We can handle the minions, but we may as well wait until the vampires have returned to the mortal world.”
“Honey, the last time this came up you tried to talk me out of fighting a spirit. You said I’d probably get my ass kicked.”
“This is important, Domino. That time, you were just trying to protect Adan and I didn’t think he was worth it.”
“Hey…” said Adan.
“It wasn’t really you, Adan,” Honey said. “The changeling was a loser.”
“Thanks, I think.”
“I just think Jack’s right about this, Domino,” the piskie continued. “In Avalon or in the Between, fighting isn’t just about violence. It has power. Think of it as a ritual. You can’t just skip ahead to the last step. You have to do it right.
Maybe that’s what this Hecate is trying to tell you.”
I knew the truth when I heard it and I wasn’t afraid to face La Calavera. I was afraid I’d fail. Nothing much had changed since Honey had tried to train me in the kung-fu magic at the L.A. Coliseum in the Between. I still sucked at it. How would it help the Xolos if I called out La Calavera and she put the beat-down on me?
“If we have to go mano a mano,” I said, “why does it have to be in the Between? I can summon her into this world and wipe the floor with her.”
“For the same reason we can’t just bushwhack her, Domino,” Honey said. “You have to defeat her in her place of power to free the Xolos.”
“I’d like to have some time alone with whoever came up with these stupid rules.”
“It doesn’t have to be you, Domino,” Adan said. “I’ll do it.”
It was almost startling to discover it didn’t piss me off. I knew why he was offering. I knew he wasn’t challenging me. “That would probably be the smart thing to do,” I said, “but it has to be me. I’m the wartime
