I gestured with my free hand. “Sit Manus Mea.” The closet opened. The wall panel slid aside and the proper buttons on the keypad pushed themselves. There was a soft electronic beep and the safe door swung open as well.
“Now, your turn,” Ankou said.
“Yeah,” I said. “My turn.” I slid the needle into his neck and pushed the plunger down hard. Ankou began to try to sit up. He made a faint popping sound in his throat, like he was fighting to get air and slumped back onto the bed.
“I want the last thing you can comprehend to be this,” I said. “You plan to hunt that little boy down, and kill him, as easily as you killed Caern.”
Ankou’s form shivered between his mortal self and his true Fae nature, like a switch was being flipped by some mad, spasming god, snapping him back and forth between his real self and the diminished mortal illusion.
“I gave her my word too,” I said. “That didn’t work out too good for her either.”
The Fae lord’s polychromatic eyes dimmed and rolled back in his skull as his body thrashed, fighting the invading poison. Drool spilled from his mouth, gasping like a fish out of water.
“You’re right. I’m a son of a bitch,” I said. “You reminded me there’s a cost to trying to play at being anything else.” He shriveled back into his mortal guise and lay on the bed shuddering with each breath. “As to breaking my word, Fae have no souls for me to swear on. Everything Caern was is gone now, thanks to you. And when you leave this world after however long you exist in that tortured prison of a body, you will be scattered on the wind, gone forever. I wanted those to be the last words in your ear that made any sense to you as your brain was set on fire. You fucked with the wrong monkey, Theo.”
Ankou made a whistling noise and his eyes rolled wildly around, searching, fighting to remain still, to focus on anything. He was gone.
“Nice doing business with you, Lord Ankou,” I said, dropping the empty needle on the edge of his bed. “Enjoy your early retirement.”
TWENTY-SIX
It took me a day to find the old ranch in Leucadia that had belonged to Joey’s late uncle. The hunt was complicated by the fact I didn’t know Joey’s last name, or his uncle’s. I knew Caern’s son, Garland, was named after the dead man, but that was it.
I decided not to use magic to find Garland because the Dugpa or the Nightwise were out there, sniffing for him and for me. A shiver of a power, especially from me, might catch their attention. The Fae artifact, Caern’s mother’s necklace, was hiding me quite effectively, and I saw no reason to do anything to change that. I figured I had given House Ankou enough to keep them busy, so I didn’t worry about them making this more of a cluster fuck than it already was.
The scant intel I had would have been more than enough for Grinner to find the place, but Grinner was down, maimed. I searched the old way, the hard way. I did title searches at the county courthouse, looking for any Garlands, or even the first initial G. I looked for properties maybe far behind on their property taxes, just scraping by. I also looked for transfers of property within families, and finally for condemned properties in Encinitas. Then I drove around, talked to farmers, ranchers, surfers, convenience store clerks, even a few wandering cops. I had lies for all of them. I finally found it on a lonely, rocky, wooded lot off east Neptune Avenue. It was a run-down California-style beach house. The yard was kept up somewhat, but just on the verge of being overgrown. It was off from the road a bit, with walls of foliage separating it from its more affluent peers, taking up the better part of a large corner lot. The whole neighborhood was a mixture of wealth, middle class, retirees, and blue collar. The late Uncle Garland’s house probably saw its heyday in the late sixties, when this area was most likely more working class and surfer.
After scouting around a bit, I found a 7-Eleven. I thought about calling Dwayne for some backup and muscle in case things got rough. Then Grinner and Vigil punched my memory and I decided if it got rough I’d deal with it on my own. I also considered buying a forty of some malt liquor; I managed to pass that up too, but it was even harder. No fuck-ups, not now. Too many sharks circling.
I came back after dark to the old house. There were no cars parked in the driveway that wound up the hill, no lights on in any of the windows, in fact, no indication of active electricity or habitation at all as I drove by. I parked Ankou’s stolen sports car down Neptune, and walked back up, heading into the brush at the edge of the wooded lot, about a half acre from the ramshackle house.
Skirting through the darkness of the stand of trees, I could hear the ocean waves off to my left and below the cliffs. Stray gulls, hurrying home after dark, challenged the surf’s roar with their lonely screeches. I could smell fresh mint and sea salt. I felt my body relax in spite of itself. Dwayne would have moved through the lot without making a sound, like poisoned thought. I am not Dwayne. Still, I’ve done my share of B and E’s in my time and I managed to get close enough to the edge of the tree line to see the dark house and the backyard without tripping and falling on my
