Blue snorted. “Brett Glide, shit. Little pissant, he don’t wipe his ass without clearing it with…” He shut up. He was scared of them, really scared of them, and that scared me. Something was trying to get my attention, something was wrong on a basic, subatomic level, some metaphysical fire alarm was screaming. I was close to what I needed. I focused on Blue. “Look, I don’t know no names ’cept Glide’s. Period, end of fuckin’ sentence.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, here’s another name you might be familiar with.” I said the name; it was a common, northern, blue-collar, American name, nothing special, except to the person who gave it and the person it belonged to. Roland Blue visibly paled when I said it.
“How the hell did you get that?” He stood. The blood returned to his face and his wide smile was gone. He was furious, afraid, and panicking. “How?!”
“I guess I hocked my reflection for it,” I said. “Sit the fuck down, Rolly. Have another drink. We got business.”
Wayne English had done me one more solid, an ace in the hole. He had hacked into the Akashic record, the sum total of all human knowledge, past, present, and future, and found a long-hidden name for me, Roland Blue’s true name. That simple identifier gave me direct access into the man’s soul, into the very core of him. The Akashic was tricky to navigate, and English was the only wizard still alive that I knew who wasn’t afraid to go in there. Complex questions with complex answers could take weeks, or longer, to be answered, but a single name, obscured by pact magic with nickel-and-dime entities that the Acidmancer could dig up in the short time I had given him.
“You son of a bitch,” Blue said. “I should have known you wouldn’t show your ass to me unless you had a fucking ringer. You’ve always been a sneaky piece o’ shit, Ballard. You remember Logan Goddard?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You guys were tight, went way back.”
“You remember killin’ him? Hittin’ him with a cheap-as-fuck spell from behind?”
“Vaguely,” I said. “I was pretty high at the time. I killed him because he was your friend, Rolly. I thought you should know that.”
“You fuckin’ mouth-breathin’ redneck bastard,” he said. I felt him marshaling his power, drawing on his rage to build an invisible murder machine.
“You think I’d go to the trouble of digging up your true name and walk in here unless I had something special to lay you out with?” I said. “Drop that working, or you die right now.”
Blue released it. It fluttered angry and hot between us for an instant, then it was gone. I smiled. Blue glared at me across the desk.
“You’re going to tell me who yanks Brett Glide’s chain,” I said, “or I will give your true name to every second-rate demon, back alley spirit, and negative entity you’ve hustled or shook down over your illustrious career. They won’t find a body. They won’t even find a grease spot of the great Roland Blue.” A dry, rasping chuckle seemed to emanate from inside the cerulean-colored tie.
“But first, the warm-up round. Crystal Myth,” I said, “Ankou’s daughter. You said she split. You and the Dugpa must have looked for her. They had too much invested in her, and you saw her as too good a meal ticket to just let slip away.” Blue nodded, his gangster cool shattered. He was pale and sweaty now, just like me.
“You feelin’ that?” he said, rubbing his face. “Like someone crappin’ inside me, like catching the flu on the fuckin’ wind. What the fuck is that?”
“The girl, Rolly,” I said. He nodded, wiped his head, and rubbed the sweat onto his pants leg. I was feeling claustrophobic, like I needed to throw up, to run.
“Yeah, yeah, we turned the city up as much as we could looking for her,” he said. “Buses, trains, airport—zip. We thought we might have her when she went to the doc they sent all the girls to, but she never showed.”
“Doctor?” I said. I could feel it now, the pressure on my Ajna chakra, like a psychic sinus headache. “She needed a doctor?”
“She was in, y’know, a family way.” I remembered what the Weathermen had told me about Caern getting sick at the party and saying she was pregnant to Red. “The Dugpa had me send all their girls that got knocked up to this one doctor. She never showed up, though.” All my instincts were in fight-or-flight mode, and I honestly couldn’t figure out why. Blue’s office’s defenses were fine; something was wrong but I had no clue from where. It was time to wrap this up and get the hell out of here.
“Now for the grand prize,” I said. “I forget your true name, and we never had this chat. Who runs the Dugpa, Rolly, who’s Glide’s boss, and how do I find him?”
Something was shitting itself into our world, our space-time, right on top of us, a tumor made of infected emotion. Shadows deepened, stretched, grasped at the edge of the room, as the linkages to our world shivered and warped. “Rolly.” I stood, knocking my chair to the floor. Blue stood as well, feeling its arrival, realizing as I did that the ill feelings we had both been experiencing were our world fighting off the infection of this invader. I felt Blue’s defenses rise around him, and I snapped mine up too. It was here, tearing through the membrane of the real, born out of nothing, spewing malice as afterbirth.
The thing creaked on three rubber wheels instead of legs and feet; one of the wheels was palsied, like a broken shopping cart’s. It sped out of the darkness it brought with it and came directly at Roland. Its face was crumpled metal married to savaged flesh, partly hidden by a blood-soaked surgical mask. Blue spit out a curt spell and gestured with his hand toward the thing. There was
