Jack found that rather debatable, personally, but he just nodded. Information over reaction. Calm over chaos. That was how Pete would do it. Pete would protect herself, and him, and Kim. She’d get to the bottom of it and find out what Sanford and Abbadon were really up to.
“Fine. You got me,” Jack said. Sanford clapped his hands together and then wiped them with a wad of paper.
“Excellent. Gator, pay up and go get the whore. We can’t have her running around in her condition.”
Gator pulled a wad of cash from his pocket and shoved it at the teenager. “You did good, kid. Never saw nothing, right?”
“Y-yes, sir,” the kid stammered. “Have a good night, sir.”
Sanford escorted Jack to the same black SUV, but this time they both sat in the back seat. Presently, Gator came back, prehistoric brow set in a frown. “Whore’s not there.”
“Fuck,” Sanford muttered, passing a hand over his face. “Abbadon can deal with her, then. Women are a pain in the ass, Jack. Don’t let that one you’ve gotten saddled with tell you any different.”
Gator drove, but they didn’t go to Sanford’s house. They drove far to the east, past the outlying bits of Los Angeles, past Riverside and Thousand Oaks and into the high desert, until Jack could look down the mountains behind him and see Los Angeles spread out like a handful of broken glass under a streetlamp, gleaming and shattered into a thousand fragments.
“Bright lights,” Sanford said. “Blinding, really. Hard to see what’s staring at you from the dark outside.”
“I know what is,” Jack said. “So where the fuck are we going?”
“To the truth,” Sanford said, as the car slowed and they turned up a long drive, lined with the wispy, dancing forms of cypress trees. “About me, Abbadon, and all of it. What you wanted, isn’t it?”
Jack looked up the drive to the dark shadow of the house beyond. The Black was thick here, almost thick enough to touch, springing from the center of the roof and swirling across his senses in a tsunami.
“Not really,” he told Sanford, but he got out of the car, gravel crunching under his boots, and walked toward the deep well of the Black anyway.
PART THREE
RESURRECTION
CHAPTER 22
There was silence when Jack approached the house, except for his boots on the gravel drive and the click of Gator’s lighter as he lit one of his brown, wormlike fags. No birds, no coyotes, not even wind disturbed the space around the house.
Places like this were rare, places where the Black exerted such perfect control over the environment of the daylight world. Usually they were concentration camps, mass graves, sites of massacre or cold-blooded murder. Jack had backpacked in Belgium and stood in the perfect stillness of the Ardennes Forest, watched the green- and gray-uniformed spirits flit among the trees, and heard the absolute stillness of the Black, which had absorbed the deaths of thousands on the soft, spongy ground.
Sanford at his shoulder made him jump. He tried to disguise it as working the kinks from his neck, but Sanford’s grin told him he hadn’t managed it. “Aren’t you going to ask me where we are?”
Jack shrugged. “Wouldn’t want to rob you of tour-guiding.”
“You know,” Sanford said, starting for the front steps, broad as three bodies laid end to end, “that whole smartass defense mechanism isn’t fooling anyone.” He looked back at Jack, his eyes pools in the low light. “Everyone is afraid of something, Jack. Even you.”
Gator shoved Jack from behind. “Move it, peckerwood.”
The doors opened at Sanford’s approach, and he shoved them wide. “You said you wanted the truth, Jack. So come in.”
Jack looked up out of habit. Nothing was carved into the doorframe, and no hexes hung in place, but the psychic void inside would be enough to deter all but the most ignorant of mages. Which placed him squarely there, he supposed. Jack Winter, tilting at windmills and leaping off cliffs.
The foyer was laid out in tiles that rang under his heels. Dead leaves skittered in the corners when the door shut. A fountain dominated the center, a nymph being swallowed by a many-eyed, tentacled sea beast. The nymph had long lines of rust traveling down her breasts and the apex of her thighs, water long gone.
“Nice place,” he said. Sanford flipped an old push-button switch and a single bulb in the chandelier above flickered to life.
“It gets the job done,” he said. “Built by an orange farmer in the twenties. Howard Hughes stayed here. And Basil Locke bought it in 1939.”
Gator was still in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot, and Sanford snapped his fingers at him. “For fuck’s sake, nothing is going to bite you. Get in here.”
Jack watched the big man’s back stiffen. Maybe Gator wasn’t as colossal a moron as he appeared. If Jack had a choice, he wouldn’t be here either. While Sanford puttered around, he went over the list. Pete wouldn’t be here—he would’ve felt her, if she was anywhere on the grounds. She wouldn’t be at Sanford’s house. Too obvious for a man who loved a twist ending. That left a myriad of places Jack hadn’t guessed at yet, which meant he had to go along with Sanford a little longer. He just hoped he didn’t lose his temper and stave the bastard’s face in before he made sure Pete was safe.
“Locke made a couple of films overseas,” Sanford said. He walked, turning on lights as he went, until they stood in a vast atrium that overlooked the view of Los Angeles, far in the distance. “Genre stuff, nothing that the international audience was interested in. But he met a nice young man named Heinrich Himmler in Germany, in 1938. What a Russian-born lapsed Jew was doing partying with fledgling Nazis, I couldn’t tell you, but he picked up some interesting theories. Did you know that both Himmler and Hitler were deeply involved with the Thule?”
“Everybody knows that,” Jack said. “It’s not exactly a state secret.”
“The Nazis didn’t understand the Black,” Sanford said. “Didn’t understand that to use magic you had to have your frequency tuned in the first place. Have the knack. But Locke did. And when he came back, he bought this mansion. Spent more and more time up here. After 1942, he never made another film. He died here, in obscurity, with massive debts. A couple of studio heads kicked in and bought the place out of pity, used it for a few location shoots, but as you can tell…” He gestured around the empty room. A single ratty sofa, the kind of plaid that always seemed to be stained with beer and cum no matter how clean it was, sat in one corner, its arms chewed by rats.
“Not exactly a comforting sort of air to the place,” Jack said.
“Film crews suffered a rash of unexplained deaths, a wing caught fire in the seventies and burned some no- name actress,” Sanford said. “After the fire, the estate came looking for investors, and they contacted me.” He grinned, walking to the windows. Outside, a swimming pool full of dead branches and a foot or so of stinking sewer-tinged water glowed with oily life. “I knew right away what had gone on here.”
Something to rend the Black so thoroughly it was a dead vortex across all his senses. Jack tried to keep his expression neutral. Sanford didn’t have a talent, was nothing more than a groupie. What he actually knew about magic would probably be a wild guess, at best.
“Locke didn’t just collect esoteric shit,” Sanford said. “He found something much better. Something tangible.” He pressed his palms against the glass. “He found a way to pass through just like light through a window.”
Jack and Sanford turned as one when the front doors swung open again and a shadow rolled across the
