“You show me that you want justice for those murdered girls because it’s an affront to your sense of decency, to your desire for justice, not because it’s a challenge to you, to catch the killer, to win to soothe your own rapacious ego. Do what you enjoy doing so much, Laytham, prove me wrong. Summon it.”
I raised my palm. I focused my energies, the lenses of my chakra opened. They were the visualization I had settled on as my primary focus for my power. They couldn’t help me here. This was rote magic, a specific visualization exercise, which tapped into your mental state, your belief systems. It was, in a way, like a Rorschach test for wizards. You had the qualities the spell sought to unlock its tumblers and activate, or you didn’t. I tried to focus my thoughts on Jane Doe, on all the Jane Does, on the horrible things that had been done to them, to the ultimate affront of having all that they were torn from them and just … ripped apart, lost, gone, forever.
Unbidden, my thoughts went to the man at the dogfighting house, the one I had casually reaped of his soul. I felt the current of his life force burn through me, and the high, the almost godlike purity and power it gave me. I had done the same thing the killer had done, almost without a thought, and it was far from my first time doing it. The Brilliant Badge flared for a moment, then sparked feebly in my hand and collapsed. The light failed, and my palm was empty. Gida said nothing for a time. She slid the bottle across the table to me.
“Take it with you,” she said. “Twenty-four hours. Be out of my city, Laytham. You should never have come back here.” I stood and took the bottle.
“I know why he’s doing it,” I said. “It’s a drug, a rush. He cultivates these girls, carefully, slowly degrades them, makes them fall a few inches at a time. It probably takes years—that’s why the time between the kills—and then he…”
Gida stood, her face still a placid frozen lake, but there was a sharp edge in her voice, no mercy, no compromise. She was done listening. It was the Maven of the Nightwise speaking now. “Twenty-four hours, and then I order all of my people, including your ex-partner, to hunt you down and drag you out of L.A., dead or alive, Laytham. It’s over.”
“… and then he fucking harvests them like goddamned crops!” I said and drove my fist down on her desk. Luke and Bridgette came through the door, eldritch power dancing at their fingertips. Both looked a little worse for wear from our time in the elevator, and both looked more than ready to open up on me. Gida raised a hand for them to hold. “He fucking smokes their soul like really good weed, and he gets off on it. It makes him feel like a god. Maybe he even keeps a little of their energy to supplement his own! He’s in the fucking Life, Gida, goddamn it, are you fucking blind? I know him! I understand him!”
“Yes,” she said. “You do. And that, Laytham, that is your problem. Good-bye.” She looked to her two loyal agents. “Mr. Ballard is leaving. Make sure he finds his way out unmolested.”
“Yes, Maven,” they intoned. I pushed past them, the bottle in my hand.
“I know my way out,” I said. “Fuck you, Gida.”
* * *
I wandered through the streets of Chinatown, multicolored lanterns and lurking dragons my companions. It was late, but clusters of drunk tourists still weaved along the streets of light, avoiding the shadows I had walked out of. The whiskey bottle was my companion too, and I remembered its sweet, smoky voice offering forgiveness, understanding, comfort. I chuckled to myself, Southern comfort.
I smashed the bottle in the gutter, scaring a flock of tourists and making them hustle to the other side of the street. I watched thousands of dollars’ worth of golden absolution drain into the gutter. I hailed a cab and headed back to Elextra’s house.
* * *
The way a Nightwise investigation worked was like this: my elevator-buddies, Bridgette and Luke, had contacts with LAPD, detectives who either were in the order or knew the score. This would be investigated as a homicide by the daylight cops, and the Nightwise who caught the case, in this instance, most likely Bridgette and Luke, would run a parallel shadow investigation into any and all connections to the Life and its denizens. A lot of so-called occult crime had nothing to do with the Life or anything even remotely occult. It was often the mentally ill or posers who had read the paperback of the Necronomicon and thought they were John Constantine now. That wasn’t the case with what had killed poor Elextra, and not-so-poor George. I had a hunch what it was, but it seemed that my hunch was impossible. I wanted to go over the crime scene, and I was pretty sure that the LAPD wouldn’t “discover” the scene for at least another day or so. I also knew that Luke and Bridgette were patching themselves up and cursing my name right now, so I didn’t have a lot of time to dick around.
The mystic seals they had placed on the house were tougher to crack than the ones on Caern’s apartment back in Greece, but I was up to it. I had been taught how to bypass protective enchantments by one of the best thieves in the Life. I hadn’t seen her since she had been part of my caper to rip
