“Of course he fucking did!” I said. “He is sketch! You read like someone who doesn’t hang out with sketch-ass people.” I pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “You are a damn knight of the houses of the Shining Lands. You don’t normally traffic with pornographers, lowlifes, and drug dealers, except for your boss, of course. You come off like a tourist, a cop, or the hand of wrath for some angry Mafia god, and it shows.”
“Good!” he said. “I worked damn hard for a very long time to wash the stink of that life off of me.” He gestured toward my cigarette. I handed it to him across the roof and he took a long drag on it. He savored the smoke in his lungs like a fine wine, exhaled it, and passed it back to me. “I tossed out the code of the street, all that bullshit from the bangers, the junkies, the players, the whores. I built something for me, something that didn’t make me want to eat a gun or drink myself into a coma every night. I’m never going to apologize for being who I am.”
I nodded and took a long pull on the smoke. “Look, right now, we’re heading into the deepest parts of the pits you dragged yourself out of,” I said. “I am a hustler, a player, and probably the biggest whore you’ll ever meet. This is my backyard we’re walking through, not yours, not anymore. Ankou knew that. He knew he’d need a scumbag to find his little girl. You send someone like me down into the sewer, because it’s my home. Let me do my job. It’s a pretty awful job, but I’m the best at it. Let me do it.”
I offered Vigil the cigarette again. He considered it for a long moment and then shook his head, curtly. “You know exactly what Ankou and his needle-eared country club buddies see when they look at me.” Vigil’s voice was cold slate. “Product—a commodity, a resource—a half-breed, trap-house thug his people recruited straight out of prison.You know what being a ‘short ear’ means in their society, their world. It’s the same shit I dealt with before I even knew what the fuck the Fae were—being invisible in broad daylight, or the center of fucking attention, like you’re going to jump someone or steal something every second. Being disposable, anonymous, to being feared and mistrusted. Getting told silently every goddamned day that it’s not your world, not your home. You feel that acid eat away at your insides, day after day, year after year, until you’re empty, hollow, but still walking around. Hell, the color of my skin barely lowered me another rung in their estimation once they found out I was half-Fae.
“I owe Ankou a debt, do you understand that?” I nodded. “I didn’t give a damn about myself or anyone else, and it locked me up so tight I couldn’t feel a scrap of daylight, couldn’t feel the sun warm on my skin. I rebuilt myself one promise at a time, one unbreakable line at a time. That’s the power of discipline, of a code. It’s your armor, no one can take it from you but you. I made an oath to keep you alive, to find Caern, and make sure she’s safe. I made that oath not just to a man I owe a debt of honor to, I made it to myself. If you don’t got a code, you have nothing.”
“Codes won’t save you,” I said. “Honor won’t save you. I’m the ghost of Christmas-yet-to-come. You cling too tight to that shit, when it fails you—and it will fail you—you go under fast and you go under deep.”
“So what does save you from yourself?” he asked.
“Let me get back to you on that,” I said.
Vigil sighed and shook his head.
“Look, my job is to be the shield,” he said, “even if that means protecting you from you. I kill people; I lay the mighty low. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at—killing—since I was thirteen. I gave my word—that’s all life has left me—so you let me do my job and keep you alive.”
It was quiet for a time, the traffic of the boulevard muffled by the buildings. In the ruins of a life full of lies and violence, failures, and terrible mistakes, we’d each navigated the rubble by the guttering light of our better selves. Vigil and I locked eyes. I nodded. Vigil nodded back. “Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “Where to next?”
* * *
Tucked away at 7734 Santa Monica Boulevard is a secret shrine, a monument to lives and souls hacked and hewn upon gilded beds. It is a haunted place of fallen street saints, chewed up and spit out by Moloch, by Hollywood’s honeyed lies, devoured by you and by me. It is a temple that holds testament to the loss of the dearest of commodities, and it is home to a hidden goddess.
Vigil and I parked on the street and walked back. It was close to midnight. The theater was partially hidden behind a large Moreton Bay fig tree. The marquee declared STUDS THEATRE. When I had lived in L.A., it had been called the Pussycat. This old porn movie palace was the site of the skin-trade’s version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The handprints, footprints, and signatures of the stars and starlets of porn’s “Golden Age” were arrayed along the sidewalk in front of Studs.
I walked up to the ticket window. “Two tickets for the main screen,” I said.
“What are you doing?” Vigil asked.
“Taking you to the movies,” I said. “You buy the popcorn.”
* * *
There was a stale smell in the dark theater. The feature currently playing was a classic piece of cinema called Rude Boyz 3. Vigil and I stood by the lobby
