“Because it wasn’t that easy,” Jett answered. “Charlotte said that Freeman had been talking about staging a frontal assault on the Guildhall for years, but wasn’t sure that he would survive long enough to bring them all down. And even if he did, he knew it wasn’t likely that he would be coming back alive, and he worried about leaving the city unprotected. Because even with the Guildhall gone, there was every chance that someone else might come along and make the same sort of pact with the Otherworld that they had. But the old Mayan had started training Aguilar by that point, so Freeman must have felt like it was time to take that risk.”
“In Aguilar’s journals he talks about spending most of his life protecting the city against invaders from another world,” Izzie said.
“His journals,” Jett repeated, sneering. “He kept his own journals, did he? Probably just because he couldn’t get his hands on the ones that Freeman left behind.”
Izzie arched an eyebrow.
“That was part of the reason that he and Charlotte fell out,” he explained. “The old Mayan died not too long after Freeman, and Aguilar figured that left him in charge. But his training wasn’t quite complete, and he said that he needed Freeman’s own secret journals to study. But Charlotte just couldn’t bring herself to part with them. They were all that she had left of him. Aguilar seemed not to have handled things as delicately as he might’ve, and said some unflattering things about Freeman. Charlotte got her back up, and dug in her heels. She locked the journals away where Aguilar couldn’t get at them, and told him to go eat sand, in so many words.”
Izzie wondered whether that accounted for why she hadn’t come across any mention of Alistair Freeman or Charlotte McKee in Aguilar’s own journals. Which reminded her of the references that she had read about the daykeepers and the Sight.
“But Aguilar didn’t have the knack, did he?” Izzie asked.
The old man shook his head. “Not to hear Charlotte tell it. She said that he had to use some kind of brew that the Mayan had brought up from the Mexican jungle with him. It let him see the shadows, not quite like Freeman could, or me for that matter, but well enough to know they were there.”
That would be the ilbal, Izzie knew. The same drug that Aguilar would later pass on to Nicholas Fuller, the last two vials of which Patrick had taken from a file box in the 10th Precinct station house’s community room, and which were now sitting in a gun case in his living room.
“I was lucky that I got to know Charlotte when I did,” Jett went on. “She was already in pretty poor health, and she didn’t have too much more life left in her. When she passed, it seemed to me like she’d held on until she could find someone to hand off the torch to, and when I came along she felt like she’d earned her rest. Aguilar was still at it, of course, but he pretty much concerned himself exclusively to his own people down in Oceanview, leaving the rest of the city to fend for itself. But Charlotte told me that the things I’d seen since coming to Recondito—the shadows, the thing out in other space— it all meant that the same darkness that had taken root back in the Guildhall days was coming back, and that someone would have to contend with it. So Charlotte looked to me to pick up where Freeman had left off, and I think that’s why she left his journals to me in her will.”
“You have his journals?” Izzie leaned forward, eagerly. “Everything he wrote about the Guildhall?
“Had them,” the old man answered. “Boxes of the things, along with one of Freeman’s silver-plated Colt .45s and a case full of rounds. The pistol would end up coming in handy, but I ended up losing all but one of the journals in a fire back in ’78, which seemed kind of fitting, considering how Freeman had ended up himself. There wasn’t anything in them about that last night in the Guildhall, of course, since he didn’t live long enough to write anything down. But they were full of all sorts of stuff he’d gathered about the Guildhall members and their allies over the years, and what he’d learned about the Otherworld, the Shades, and the Ridden. And that helped me understand what I was seeing on the streets of Recondito around me. Somebody was taking normal folk and corrupting them, turning them into the Ridden. Only I didn’t have the first idea who was behind it.”
The old man pulled the blanket up higher around himself, shivering almost imperceptibly.
“So I did what seemed natural. I went on recon. Started tailing the folks I could see out at night, with the shadows hanging around their heads. Seeing where they came from, seeing where they went. I asked after them with people I saw them talking to on the street, got a few names to track down. I went around to the Recondito PD to see if any of them had rap sheets, and got stonewalled until I found a friendly gal in the Records Division up in the Hall of Justice who said she liked my smile, and agreed to run the names in exchange for a meal and a couple of drinks. Most of them were young folks, and turned out that some of them were runaways, or had been reported by their families as missing persons. There were a lot of kids out on the streets in those days, you have to remember. This was a few years after the Manson murders had put the lie to all of that flower power bullshit, but there were still more than enough hippies out on the street corners in the Kiev, busking or panhandling or what have you.”
“Did you try talking
