Side Jobs

“He’d still be able to tell she was a practitioner.”

“Only if he actually touched her,” Bob said. “And even then, if she’s significantly different from a normal human, mentally, it’ll alter the sense of her aura. Besides, sensing a little tingle of magical potential in a client is a whole lot different from realizing that she’s spattered in supernatural gore.”

“I get it. So instead she changed my face.”

“Technically, she didn’t change it,” the skull said. “It’s an illusion. You’re still you under there. The question is why would she do that, particularly.”

I frowned. “To slow me down,” I said, thinking it through. It didn’t take me long to figure out what the Stygian had in mind, and I clenched my teeth in frustration. “Oh, empty night. She’s told Harry that there’s a villain in the piece. She’s shown him the picture of the bad man who took the poor kid.” I gestured at my face. “And she’s made me look like him.”

“Damn,” Bob said, admiration in his tone. “That’s sneaky. Harry’s awfully quick on the draw these days. If you mosey up, he might not give you a chance to explain anything.”

I sighed. “The kind of day I’m having, he probably wouldn’t. Are you going to help me or not?”

“Answer me one more question,” the skull said, quieter now.

“Okay.”

“Why?” he asked. “Why would vampires be a part of this? Why would something that eats people be interested in saving humanity from devouring demon gods?”

I snorted. “You want me to tell you that it’s because in our secret hearts, we long to be heroes? Or that deep down, there’s something in us that cries out for humanity, for redemption?” I shook my head and smiled at him, showing teeth. “At the end of the day? Because we don’t like competition.”

“Finally,” Bob said, with a roll of his eyelights. “A motive I can understand. Okay.”

“Okay?”

The skull turned on its shelf, to face the table. “I can show you how to find Harry. But the first thing we do is fix your face. Come on in, let me get a better look.”

Mnemonic lightning flashed and boomed between my ears, and I felt myself smile. “No,” I said.

The skull tilted slightly to one side, watching me. “No?”

“No. I’ve got a better idea.”

5

The skull tried to explain why the tracking spell he showed me was going to work when my own had failed, but about five seconds into the technical talk I started substituting “blah blah blah” for everything he was saying.

I’m not a wizard, okay? I’m a cheap hack. I don’t care why it works, as long as it works.

The Stygian had staged her little charade in a warehouse down in Hammond. When I caught up to my brother, he and the Stygian were lurking in an alley across the street from the warehouse, watching the place. The Stygian was playing her part, that of the frightened, nervous female, anxious with the need to bring her offspring safely home again. She was a reasonably good actress, too, for someone with so little humanity. She was probably a couple of centuries old. She’d had time to get in some practice.

I went up the side of the building adjacent to the warehouse, so that I could get a look at the place, too. There were a couple more ghouls guarding the building, wearing the brown uniforms of private security personnel. They kept up a regular walking routine around the warehouse’s exterior and interior, and they weren’t bothering to so much as glance up at the rooftop I was on. It was five floors up with no fire escape and nothing but bricks to hold on to. Why should they?

I paced down to the back side of the warehouse, where Harry and the Stygian couldn’t spot me, waited until the pacing ghouls were both out of sight, and then leapt the forty feet or so from my rooftop to the roof of the warehouse. I landed in a roll, in near-complete silence, and froze for a long moment, waiting to see if anyone raised an outcry.

No one did. I hadn’t been spotted.

I settled down to wait.

Harry made his move sometime between three and four in the morning, when the guards were most likely to be bored, tired, and convinced that nothing was going to happen tonight—and when there would be the fewest possible witnesses or innocent bystanders. From the front of the warehouse came his resonant baritone, crying out one of those pretend-Latin spell incantations he uses. There was a flash of light, a boom like thunder, and a crash of something slamming into sheet metal with the force of a cannonball.

Scratch one ghoul. My brother hates the creatures with a passion so pure that it’s almost holy. If his first attack hadn’t killed the thing, he’d finish it off before long. I heard the other ghoul shriek as it began to transform.

Once everyone’s attention was on the attack at the front door, I went in through a skylight.

The warehouse was stacked high with years of accumulated junk, consisting mostly of the remains of shipping crates, stacks of loading pallets, and broken boxes. An area in the center of the floor had been cleared, and the concrete had been heavily marked up with occult symbols painted in blood, around a table that was obviously intended to be an altar. A kid, a little boy maybe nine years old, was bound hand and foot on the table, his face blotchy from crying. He was screaming and struggling against the ropes, but was firmly secured to the table.

Harry cried out again. The glass in both windows at the front side of the warehouse exploded inward in a flash of scarlet light. Something that looked disturbingly like a severed arm went tumbling by the open doorway.

I kept looking until I spotted it—the Lexicon Malos, a leather-bound book, like a big old handwritten journal, just the kind of impressive grimoire occult nut-jobs like the Stygians are so giddy about. It rested on a little pedestal beside the table. It didn’t actually have a flashing neon sign over it reading NOTICE ME, but it was pretty close.

I went hand over hand along the steel-beam rafters until I got to one of the girders that ran down the wall. Then I slid down it to the floor and hurried over to the altar and the pedestal. I opened the nylon backpack in my hands, stuffed the Lexicon Malos into it, zipped it closed, and then slid my arms through the shoulder straps.

I could have bailed then. I suppose it would have been the smartest thing. Once the book was removed from the equation, the Stygian’s entire operation was blown. Granted, she and the other members of the Sisterhood would try it again somewhere else, but they would have been stopped for the time being.

But the bitch had messed with my brother.

“For the time being” wasn’t good enough.

Harry came through the front door of the warehouse, with the Stygian treading fearfully behind him, pretending to tremble. Tall, skinny, sharp-featured, and somewhat rough-looking, Harry wore his usual wizarding gear—the black leather duster. He carried a carved staff in his left hand, a shorter, more heavily carved rod in his right, and the tip of the rod glowed with a sullen red-orange flame.

I was waiting for them.

I had wrapped the dark red blanket around my shoulders and upper body like some sort of dramatic ceremonial garb. I stood over the child, a wicked-looking knife I’d found lying on the altar in hand, with my head thrown back and a sneer on my illusion-covered face.

“So!” I boomed in my most overblown voice. “You have defeated my minions!”

“You have got to be kidding me,” my brother said, staring at me with an expression somewhere between bemusement and naked contempt. “I mean . . . Jesus, look at this place. I’ve seen high school plays with a higher production value than this.”

“Silence!” I thundered, pointing the knife at him. I had eyes only for the Stygian, in any case. She was