I didn't have time to discuss it. I took a handkerchief from my pocket, wrapped it around the handle of Trixie's gun to maybe preserve any prints, and lifted it, not quite pointing it at Joan. "There's not time to explain, but if you don't let me go it's going to keep happening. Someone else on the crew will get hurt tonight."
Her expression became angry. "Don't you dare threaten these people."
"It isn't a threat," I half screamed. I hated to do it, but I pointed the gun at her. "Move."
She started shaking but adjusted her grip on the hammer and shook her head.
"I mean it," I said, and took a step forward, radiating as much menace as I knew how.
Joan stared at the gun for a moment. Then an expression of resolution took the fear from her face. She lowered the hammer and took a step toward me, putting the barrel of the gun about six inches from her sternum. "I can't let you hurt anyone else. If you want to leave," she said quietly, "you'll have to kill me too."
I stared at her for a moment. Then I gripped the gun's barrel with my left hand, left the handkerchief around the handle, and offered it to her.
She stared at me. "What are you doing?"
"Take it," I said. "Trixie's fingerprints are on the handle, so don't touch it. She was the shooter. She's working with someone and they're responsible for all the deaths and injuries lately. But when the cops show, she'll lie to them, and it looks bad for me. If the police arrest and hold me, I won't be able to help you when they strike again tonight. I have to go."
She shivered and took the gun. She held it like it might bite her. "I don't understand."
"Joan. If I was the one who shot them, I'd have shot you too. Would I give you the gun if I'd done it? Just leave the murder weapon here for the cops?"
She hesitated, uncertain.
"Help me," I told her. There was a tense note of fear in my voice. "I need to get back to my place, get a few things, and go before the cops start watching it. Try to delay them. Just for five minutes, please. My God, it's going to happen again again if I don't stop it." if I don't stop it."
She glanced over her shoulder at the door.
"Please, Joan," I said quietly. "God, please help me." Silence fell heavily, except for more footsteps, coming closer.
"I must be insane," she said. "I must be insane."
She stepped aside.
I did the only thing I could under the circumstances. It made me look guilty as hell, but if I wanted to keep breathing I didn't have much choice.
I ran.
Chapter Twenty-seven [image]
I hit the parking lot at a run, piled into the Blue Beetle, and started it up. Behind me I heard the building's fire alarm go off, a deafening ringing of emergency bells. In addition to the police, and probably an ambulance, a bunch of fire trucks were about to show up as well. It was going to be one hell of a mess to sort through, at least for the CPD. By the time they made sure the building had been evacuated, seen to Trixie's wound, and taken statements from everyone in the building I could probably walk to Havana. She'd bought me at least ten minutes and probably more.
"Bless you, Joan," I muttered. I slapped the old car into reverse and cleared out, heading for my apartment. I was on the highway and gone before any sirens started converging. I drove carefully and under the limit, since getting pulled over for a citation could be fatal, and tried to think unobtrusive thoughts. But I found myself mulling over the details of the malocchio malocchio.
Trixie Vixen had been in the room with me when the last curse came down, and while she was clearly involved, it hadn't come from her. She'd known about it in great detail, though, and she'd known enough about magic to screw up the hurried wards I'd raised around the studio. Couple that with bragging about her power, and I figured she'd been involved in the actual magic at some point-she probably had handled part of the ritual that brought the curse down.
It made sense. Trixie was a jumbo-sized self-obsessed drama queen, complete with melodramatic dialogue, tantrums, and smug confidence that she was the center of the universe. The deaths and near-deaths from the malocchio malocchio had given new depths to the term had given new depths to the term freak accident. freak accident. Swarms of bees, bridge-jumping cars, and electrocution in a puddle of one's own blood were some pretty ridiculous ways to kill someone. And that frozen turkey thing had come straight out of a cartoon. Swarms of bees, bridge-jumping cars, and electrocution in a puddle of one's own blood were some pretty ridiculous ways to kill someone. And that frozen turkey thing had come straight out of a cartoon.
They would have been funny if it hadn't been for the deaths.
But the curse had been different today. No winding, slow buildup, no murder weapons manufactured by the Acme Corporation, and no spillover onto other people nearby. Unlike the others, Emma's death had been the result of a surgical strike of focused, violent energy. The earlier editions of the curse had been more like a stone-headed hatchet than a scalpel. Today's curse had been far stronger than the ones I'd felt before, too.
And Trixie was the lowest common denominator.
Any kind of magic spell requires certain things to happen. You have to gather in the energy for whatever it is you're trying to do. Then you have to shape it with your thoughts and feelings into what you want it to do. And finally you have to release it in the direction you want it to go. To use a rough metaphor, you have to load the gun, aim it, and pull the trigger.
The problem was that with a curse that powerful, you were talking about a very big gun. Even with a ritual supplying the power for it, controlling that power was a task that not just anybody could do. Aiming and pulling the trigger were easier, but handling them all at once would be very difficult even for some wizards. That's why for the big projects you need three people working together, and it's the basis for the stereotype of three cackling witches casting spells in concert over a cauldron.
Trixie stormed off the set before the curse had come at Inari last night, and she hadn't been in the studio when it happened twelve hours prior to that. But she had had been there with me today. Trixie the Drama Queen's personality was stamped all over the near-insane deaths, but I was damned sure that she wasn't a wizard. been there with me today. Trixie the Drama Queen's personality was stamped all over the near-insane deaths, but I was damned sure that she wasn't a wizard.
Therefore, she'd had help. Someone would need to manage the energy, while Trixie shaped the curse into some kind of ludicrous death scenario. And someone else had to pull the trigger, channeling the spell to its intended recipient-also something that required a little more skill and focus than I was willing to believe Trixie had. So it would take three of them.
Three stregas stregas.
Three former Mrs. Arturo Genosas.
The curse that killed Emma had been different. It had been a hell of a lot stronger, for one thing, and it had come at her a hell of a lot faster. And the death it had brought down on her had been efficient and quick. If Trixie wasn't with them, then it meant that either one of the others had some serious skill, or they'd been able to find a replacement witch who had been content with making the murder swift, clean, and simple.
Four killers working together. I was the only one around who could get in their way, and they knew I was getting closer to them. Under the circumstances, they had only one logical target for the next iteration of the spell, twelve hours from now.
Me.
That was assuming, of course, that Mavra and the vampire scourge-or possibly the man I'd hired to help me kill them-didn't take me out first. Maybe they wouldn't get their chance. See? That's the power of positive thinking.
I got back to my apartment and got out of the car just in time to see Mister flying down the sidewalk as fast as he could run. He looked both ways before crossing the street, and we entered the apartment together. I started gathering things and shoving them into a nylon gym bag, then opened the door down to the lab. Bob flowed out of Mister, who promptly shuffled over to the fire and collapsed into sleep.
"Well?" I called down as I finished packing the bag. "Did you find her?"
"Yeah, I found her," Bob called.
"About time," I said. I went down the ladder in a hurry, and flicked several candles alight with a muttered word. I got out a roll of parchment about a foot and a half square. Then I spread it onto the worktable in the lab's center and set a fountain pen beside it. "Where?"
"Not far from Cabrini Green," Bob said. "I got a good look around the place."
"Good. You've got permission to come out long enough to show me what you found."
He made a sighing sound but didn't complain. The usual cloud of glowing orange motes of light slid out of the skull's eye sockets, though perhaps it was a little less bright and swirly than usual. The cloud of light surrounded the pen, and it rose up of its own accord, then began scratching a drawing of the lair on the parchment. Bob's voice, a little indistinct now, said, "You aren't going to like this."
"Why not?"
"It's a shelter."
"A homeless shelter?"
"Yeah," Bob said. "Does some rehab work with drug addicts, too."
"Stars and stones," I murmured. "How could vampires take something that public?"
"There's no real threshold on a public building, so they didn't need an invitation. I think they probably came in from Undertown, right into the shelter's basement."
"How many people have they hurt?"
Bob's pen flickered over the parchment. When I draw maps I usually end up with a series of lopsided squares and wavery lines and incomplete circles. Bob's drawing looked like it could have been done by da Vinci. "There were three bodies stacked up in a corner of the basement," Bob said. "A few of the shelter's staff had been made into rough thralls and are covering for them, them, sort of. Maybe half a dozen people hadn't been enthralled, but they were tied up and locked into a cedar closet."
"Any goons?"
"Big-time. Half a dozen Renfields, and each of them has a darkhound to boot."
"Renfields?" I asked.
"How in the world can you exist in this century and not know about Renfields?" Bob demanded. "You need a life, stat."
"I read the book. I know who Renfield was. I'm not familiar with the parlance for Renfield in the plural."
"Oh," Bob said. "What do you need to know?"
"Well. First off, what did they call them before Stoker published the book?" I asked.
"They didn't call them anything, Harry," Bob said in a tone of gentle patience. "That's why why the White Court had Stoker publish the book. To tell people about them." the White Court had Stoker publish the book. To tell people about them."
"Oh. Right." I rubbed at my eyes. "How do the vampires do their recruiting?"
"Mind-control magic," Bob said. "The usual."
"Always with the mental control," I muttered. "Let me make sure my facts are straight. Rough thralls just stand around looking blank until they get orders, right?"
"Yeah," Bob said, pen scratching. "Sort of like zombies, but they still have to go to the bathroom."
"So a Renfield is the fine version of thralldom?"
"No," Bob said. "A fine thrall is so controlled that they might not even know know that they're a thrall at all, and it lasts long-term." that they're a thrall at all, and it lasts long-term."
"Like what DuMorne did to Elaine."
"Uh, I guess so, yeah. Like that. That kind of thing takes a subtle hand, though. Enthralling someone also requires a lot of time and a certain amount of empathy, neither of which has been readily available to Mavra."
"So?" I said, getting impatient. "A Renfield is a...?"
Bob put the pen down. "It's the quick, dirty way for the Black Court to pick up some cheap muscle. Renfields have been crushed into total thralldom through brute psychic force."
"You're kidding," I said. "The kind of mental damage that would do to someone..."
"It destroys their sanity when it happens," Bob confirmed. "Makes them no good for anything but gibbering violence, but since that's pretty much what the vampires wanted to begin with it works out."
"How do you get them out of it?" I asked.
"You don't," Bob said. "The original Merlin couldn't undo it, and neither could any of the saints on record to have tried. A thrall can be freed, or recover over time. Renfields can't. From the moment their minds break they've got an expiration date."
"Ugh," I said. "What do you mean?"
"Renfields get more and more violent and deranged, and they self-destruct in a year or two. You can't fix them. For all practical purposes, they're already dead."
I went over the facts in my head, and admired how much uglier the situation had just become. Over the years I've learned that ignorance is more than just bliss. It's freaking orgasmic ecstasy. I glanced at Bob and said, "Are you sure about your facts?"
The cloud of orange light flowed tiredly back into the skull on its shelf. "Yes. DuMorne did quite a bit of research on the subject back in the day."
"Murphy isn't going to like this," I said. "Dismembering monsters with a chain saw is one thing. People are another."
"Yeah. People are easier."
"Bob," I growled. "They're people people."
"Renfields aren't, Harry," Bob said. "They might still be moving around but they're pretty much gone."
"Boy, would it be fun to explain that to a courtroom," I said. I shuddered. "Or to the White Council, for that matter. If I take out the wrong person, I could wind up in jail-or in a White Council star chamber trial. Mavra's using the laws to protect herself against us. That's so backward."
"Screw the laws! Kill 'em all!" Bob said with weary cheer.
I sighed. "What about the dogs?"
"Your basic animal," Bob said. "But they've been infused with a portion of the same kind of dark power that the Black Court runs on. They're stronger, faster, and they don't feel pain. I once saw a darkhound rip its way through a brick wall."
"I bet they look like normal dogs afterward, huh?"
"And before-ward," Bob said.
"I guess if the cops are on my case when this is over, the SPCA can come along for the ride." I shook my head. "And on top of all that, Mavra is also keeping those hostages in the closet for food. She'll use them as human shields once fighting starts."
"Or as bait in a trap," Bob said.
"Yeah. Either way it makes things more complicated, even if we go in when Mavra and her scourge are sleeping." I looked at Bob's diagram of the lair. "Any security system?"
"Old electronic one," Bob said. "Nothing fancy. No problem for you to hex it down."
"Mavra will know that. She'll have sentries. We need to get past them."
"Forget it. Rough thralls and Renfields don't exactly make the most observant guardians in the world, but the darkhounds make up for them. If you want to sneak up, you'll have to be invisible, inaudible, and unsmellable. Don't count on a surprise attack."
"Dammit. What kind of weapons are they toting?"
"Uh, teeth. Mostly teeth, Harry."
I glared at him. "Not the dogs."
"Oh. The thralls have got some baseball bats. The Renfields have assault rifles, grenades, and body armor."
"Holy crap."