I drew the greatcoat on over my suit. “Three victims already is three too many.” Settling the attached short cape over my shoulders, I fastened the buttons. “But what kind of demon freezes its victims to death?”
The old daykeeper treated me to a grin, shrugging. “You are the one with the Sight, not I.” His grin began to falter as he handed over the shoulder-holster rig. “Though Don Javier might have known.”
I checked the spring releases on both of the silver-plated Colt .45s and then arranged the short cape over my shoulders to conceal them. “Perhaps,” I said. But it had been years since the great owl of the old daykeeper had visited us in dreams.
As I slid a half-dozen loaded clips, pouches of salt, a Zippo lighter, and a small collection of crystals into the greatcoat’s pockets, Don Maeto held the mask out to me, the light of the bare bulb overhead glinting on the skull’s silvered surface.
The metal of the mask cool against my cheeks and forehead always reminds me of the weeks and months I spent in the Rattling House, learning to shadow through solid objects, cold patches left behind as I rotated back into the world. I never did master the art of shifting to other branches of the World Tree, though, much to Don Javier’s regret.
The slouch hat was last out of the coffin, and when I settled it on my head Don Mateo regarded me with something like paternal pride. “I should like to see those upstarts in San Francisco and Chicago cut so fine a figure.”
The mask hid my scowl, for which I was grateful.
Since beginning my nocturnal activities in Recondito in ’31 I’ve apparently inspired others to follow suit—the Black Hand in San Francisco, the Scarlet Scarab in New York, the Scorpion in Chicago. Perhaps the pulp magazine’s ruse works as intended, and like so many here in the city they assume the Wraith to be entirely fictional. There are times when I regret the decision to hide in plain sight, fictionalizing accounts of my activities in the pages of The Wraith Magazine so that any reports of a silver masked figure seen lurking through the streets of Recondito will be written off as an over-imaginative reader with more costuming skill than sense.
Don Mateo recited a benediction, invoking the names Dark Jaguar and Macaw House, the first mother-father pair of daykeepers, and of White Sparkstriker, who had brought the knowledge to our branch of the World Tree. He called upon Ah Puch the Fleshless, the patron deity of Xibalba, to guide our hands and expand my sight. Had we still been in the Yucatan, the old daykeeper would have worn his half-mask of jaguar pelt, and burned incense as offering to his forebears’ gods. Since coming to California, though, he’s gradually relaxed his observances, and now the curling smoke of a smoldering Lucky Strike usually suffices.
This demon of cold has struck the days previous without pattern or warning, once each in Northside, Hyde Park, and the waterfront. When Don Mateo and I headed out in the hearse, as a result, we proceeded at random, roaming from neighborhood to neighborhood, the old daykeeper on the lookout for any signs of disturbance, me searching not with my eyes but with my Sight for any intrusion from the Otherworld.
I glimpsed some evidence of incursion near the Pinnacle Tower, but quickly determined it was another of Carmody’s damnable “experiments.” I’ve warned Rex before that I won’t allow his Institute to put the city at risk unnecessarily, but they have proven useful on rare occasion, so I haven’t yet taken any serious steps to curtail their activities. I know that his wife agrees with me, though, if only for the sake of their son Jacob.
I caught a glimpse of the cold demon in the Financial District, and I shadowed out of the moving hearse and into the dark alley with a Colt in one hand and a fistful of salt in the other, ready to disrupt the invader’s tenuous connection to reality. But I’d not even gotten a good look at the demon when it turned in midair and vanished entirely from view.
The body of the demon’s fourth and latest victim lay at my feet. It was an older man, looking like a statue that had been toppled off its base. Arms up in a defensive posture, one foot held aloft to take a step the victim never completed. On the victim’s face, hoarfrost riming the line of his jaw, was an expression of shock and terror, and eyes that would never see again had shattered in their sockets like glass. But before I’d even had a chance to examine the body further I heard the sounds of screaming from the next street over.
There is a body, I Sent to Don Mateo’s thoughts as I raced down the alleyway to investigate. Had the demon retreated from reality only to reemerge a short distance away?
But it was no denizen of the Otherworld menacing the young woman huddled in the wan pool of the streetlamp’s light. Her attackers were of a far more mundane variety—or so I believed. I pocketed the salt, and filled both hands with silver-plated steel.
Eleven years writing purple prose for The Wraith Magazine, and it creeps even into my private thoughts. Ernest would doubtless consider his point made, if he knew, and that bet made in Paris decades ago finally to be won.
The young woman was Mexican, and from her dress I took her to be a housekeeper, likely returning from a day’s work . . .
CHAPTER TWENTY
Izzie left off reading as Joyce pulled the Volkswagen to a stop in front of Patrick’s house. The sun had nearly finished setting, and deep shadows pooled at the edges of the buildings.
“Do you believe all of that?” Joyce said, shouldering open the driver’s side door and reaching for her cane in the back seat. “That this Freeman guy really ran around the streets in a mask like
