Devil's Business

wondered when he’d last slept. He couldn’t remember. The world vibrated at the edges—nothing to do with his sight, but with the throbbing in his skull. More tequila. That’d help.

“I’m supposed to know about some white bitch who kicked the bucket sixty years ago?” The girl snorted. “No way, man. You want my advice, leave the dead where they are and stop having demons for your homies. That’ll make your life a lot easier.”

Jack set the glass down. “Please,” he said. “This isn’t for my own amusement. Sliver told me you knew things. And I know what you are. We can both tell that Death is coming, that the Black is out of order. If you really don’t know Lucinda, I’ll turn and walk out. But don’t brush me off and play like we don’t both know what you are.”

The girl sighed, and then clicked off the television and pointed through a curtain made from a faded floral bed sheet. “Go in there. Don’t touch anything.”

Jack ducked through the curtain. He was expecting a workroom or a sex dungeon, but not a tiny backroom crowded almost to bursting with an altar. Candle wax had congealed to stalagmites down the front and sides, and bowls of candy, bullets, and rosary beads were arranged at the foot of a statue of skeletal creature. More bottles of tequila crowded her feet, bourbon, every kind of liquor you could pick up cheaply and by the quart at the local market.

“They call her La Flaca,” the girl said at his shoulder. “The skinny girl.” She kissed her fingertips and pressed them to the statue’s feet.

“Santa Muerte,” Jack said. “Ran into some of your lot down in Mexico City about ten years ago. Not very friendly.”

“Not to nosy outsiders, no,” the girl said. She folded her arms and looked at him, eyes boring in. Jack dropped his eyes to the beads around her neck and the crucifix riding between her cleavage. She had a gimlet stare, even for an avatar of Death. Her eyes were the Morrigan’s eyes, black and animal and ancient. “Don’t let me down, man,” La Flaca said. “I know you follow Death. Might be the Eurotrash white-boy version of Death, but we’re headed to the same place. Down the dark highway. That’s the only reason I’m considering this.”

Jack pulled back his sleeve and showed her the markings. “I’ve been involved with my own skinny bitch for quite some time,” he said. “So yeah, I know what you’re on about.”

La Flaca pointed at the altar. “Give something to Santa Muerte. Ask your question, but unless you have an offering, I don’t answer.”

“Seriously?” Jack said. He looked into the face of the skeleton icon. It was cheap plaster, the features blurred and painted crookedly. Santa Muerte’s robes were polyester, singed at the edges from the dozens of candles that cast the room’s only pools of light. He looked back at her living counterpart. “What do you want from me, a kiss? A lock of my hair?”

The girl smacked him in the back of the head. “A little respect, for starters. Santa Muerte answers all requests. You just have to know how to ask her.”

Jack looked into the girl’s black eyes, back to the statue’s crooked plaster face. “I don’t have anything to offer you. Or anyone.”

The girl took out a pocket knife and offered it to Jack. “You have what we all have.” A small clay bowl between Santa Muerte’s toes held a sticky red-black liquid, evidence of who’d come here before Jack.

“I never got your name,” he told the girl as he took the knife and folded the blade open.

“I have a lot of them,” she said. “Ana’s good as any, and you’re Jack Winter, the crow-mage.”

“That obvious, is it?” The knife didn’t hurt much—he’d cut himself enough times on purpose to know you just squeezed your fist around the blade and tugged a bit. If the steel was sharp, it would do the job for you.

The dribble became a rivulet, and Jack worked his fist a few times, sending a stream of droplets into the bowl to combine with the other blood. La Flaca folded her hands.

“Pray with me,” she said.

Jack swiped his cut palm against his jeans. “Not much for praying. You got a plaster?”

The girl sighed and passed him a rag draped over the only piece of furniture in the room, an old kitchen chair. “You’re not going to make this easy on me, are you?”

Jack started to reply, but out of the corner of his eye, the statue moved. He blinked and looked again, putting it down to the flickering flames all around the edges of his vision, but no. The skinny girl’s arm, holding its long scythe, was definitely lifting, and the cheap robes wrapping the plaster were ruffling in a breeze.

The candle flames flickered and went out wholesale, filling the room with cloying beeswax smoke. Jack coughed and waved it away from his face. In the blur, the girl and the statue became one, the girl’s face growing and skeletonizing, the statue beginning to move, to take on skin and flesh and life.

You want something? The statue was grinning at him, the painted mouth slipping crookedly off the plaster hunks. There was no way the thing was moving and yet it was, pointing and talking at him.

“As a matter of fact,” Jack said. “Yeah, there’s something you can tell me.”

Nothing’s free, crow-mage, the statue hissed. What you got for me?

“I gave you blood,” Jack said. “That’s enough.”

Can’t live by blood alone, the statue said, and coughed a laugh. Got something else I want, crow-mage?

“Might as well ask, then,” Jack said. The statue was changing, growing details, the limbs moving as the skeletal feet picked their way delicately over the bowls and candle wax.

Got any smokes? The statue grinned at him.

Jack fished in his pocket and brought out his half-squashed pack of Parliaments. “Need a light?”

Nope. The cherry flared and the skeleton sucked in smoke. It billowed out from between her ribs, and she sighed. That’s the good shit.

Jack had seen stranger things than a cheap Mexican saint statue sit up and cadge a fag, but the smoke was getting thicker, making him dizzy, and he sat hard in the scarred kitchen chair. “You feel like answering a question for me?”

You can always ask La Flaca, the statue hissed. But you might not like what she has to spit back at you.

“I’ll take my chances,” Jack said. Things crawled in the shadow behind the statue, things with snakes’ bodies and women’s faces, and they leered at Jack in the low light.

Then shoot, brother, said the statue. A friend of the Hag’s is a friend of mine, you know.

One of the snakes wound its way around Jack’s wrist, pushing his sleeve back and exposing the Morrigan’s marks.

“I need to know where Lucinda Lanchester is buried,” Jack said. “Her body was moved and it’s apparently a big secret now.”

Poor little lost Lucy, the statue purred. Rolled the bone dice with a bad man and came up snake-eyes.

“It’s important,” Jack said. “If we don’t find her I can promise your city isn’t going to be around much longer.”

What do you care about the living? the statue asked. You’re one of the dead, crow-mage. The walking dead, but dead all the same.

“None of your business, you hollowed-out bitch,” Jack said. “How about that?”

You think once the four are back underground that everything will come up roses? the statue said. You think you’ll save the world and stand in the sun?

“Don’t care about that,” Jack said. “I care about a self-righteous prick not getting to play with the entire world like he’s having a tantrum in a sandbox.”

You can keep fooling yourself, amigo, said the statue. But sooner or later you’re going to see it. You have death inside you. It’s in your bones and it’s in your blood, and sooner or later death will take you for her own. You can’t fight death. We’re the end of all lines, the last stop on that dark highway, and sooner or later you’ll take that exit, crow-mage. Your kind always do.