“Seven,” Dragon said. “Jesus, Ballard, it’s like before—you lose your shit too much over this.”
“So nine total,” I said, ignoring her. “Including my two girls. When was the last one, Dragon?”
“A month ago,” Dragon said, “before that 2013.”
“All killed the same as my girls?” I asked. My old partner nodded.
“All young and pretty, all Jane Doe, all tortured and drugged, sexually assaulted, violated,” she said.
“All mutilated horribly except for their heads, their faces. Those parts of the body were all pristine.” I didn’t need her to verify it, I knew it. “And the symbol, the brand? They all have it, don’t they?”
“At different places on their body, but yes, all marked the same,” she said.
“And the other part,” I said, bitterness and anger seeping into my voice, “the other part was the same too, wasn’t it, Dragon? Otherwise the fucking Nightwise wouldn’t give any of these murders a second fucking look, would they?”
“Ballard,” Dragon said, “I know you bled for this case. I know how much Nico meant to you. I know he was the one who brought you up, but…”
“It’s a simple fucking question, Lauren,” I said. “Were they all the same as the two I worked, as my two girls?”
“Yes,” Dragon said. “All the victims had their souls ripped out of them.”
NINE
It was after one in the morning when I left Dragon at the Hard Limit. The excuse I’d given myself for seeing Lauren and Anna again was that if anyone in this city would know where I could find Dwayne and could give me an idea of where MS-13 would have Luis Demir stashed, it would be Dragon. It was a lie and a thin one. The real reason I came to see them was because I missed them and I was too damn close geographically, and too fucking sober, to get my own humanity to shut the hell up. Once upon a time the three of us had loved one another, had shared everything. Anna and Dragon had given me a sense of love and belonging I never had as a kid, except when I was with Torri Lyn.
I loved them, but I had never told them that. Mages knew words carry power, power over yourself, power over others, and over the world. “I love you” was a pact, stronger than any you could make with a demon, more potent than any hex, any curse. It was higher order magic and it left the powerful and mighty helpless in its thrall. I never told them, even when I walked away.
As a compromise to my inner bastard, I had tried to hustle Lauren into helping me and that worked. It was an awful feeling to emotionally manipulate someone you loved and who trusted you in spite of yourself. However, you do it enough and you can distance yourself from the shame and the guilt. I could teach a class on how to do it.
She had agreed to help me and to try to keep the Nightwise out of it as much as she could. She had even promised to give me more info on the murdered girls, but I was pushing her on that one, because even if it was a cold case and technically my cold case, it was still in the jurisdiction of the Nightwise and I wasn’t one of them anymore. Dragon was at heart a creature of order. I often wondered if all of her kind were like that. Lauren was born to be a cop, and being a cop, being Nightwise, was at the core of who she was. It made her a steadfast friend, a loyal lover, but it also made her a pain in the ass when it came to circumventing the rules, so that left her out of my direct involvement in picking a fight with one of the largest and most dangerous street gangs in L.A. I was going to need muscle to get next to Demir, the mica maker that had acquired Caern Ankou’s identity data, somehow. He was cozied up next to MS-13, and I had ditched my bodyguard-nanny, left his untrustworthy ass playing slap and tickle with a bunch of flying Cambodian ogres. I was going to need Dwayne. Dragon told me she had no idea where he was these days, so I started looking.
The number of homeless in L.A. fluctuates, but it’s been going up the last few years. Between the city and the county, there are over fifty thousand people living on the streets. Dwayne was one of them. If you get off the freeways, like the 110 that’s a major artery through downtown, you’ll find makeshift communities of people living close to the highways, along the overpasses, in the islands between the lanes as you leave the exits. I started looking in these cities and towns that don’t appear on any maps. I had wandered so much since leaving L.A. that, despite all the years I’d spent here, maybe some tourist had crept back in, but I felt an odd sense of juxtaposition between the gleaming towers of light and the clusters of shacks made of wood and plastic tarp in their shadow, the tattered Walmart tents reflected in the tinted glass windows of the stretch limos that glided by. L.A. is bipolar and on all the wrong meds.
An old black guy, skinny, wearing a clean denim work shirt that said TERRY over its pocket nodded when I asked if he knew Dwayne. I held a hundred dollar bill between my fingers just out of his reach but well within his sight.
“’Pends on the Du-Wayne you lookin’ for,” he said, puffing on a stub of a Swisher Sweets cigarillo. His eyes were clear and wise with old pain. “You lookin’ for tranny Du-Wayne, the crack dealer? You lookin’ for three sweaters Du-Wayne? You lookin’ for crazy Du-Wayne with the dog?”
“Crazy,” I said, “with the dog.” The old man man’s face slid, just a
