aiming, I pop off a couple more rounds in the direction of his body.
“Stop it! Stop, goddammit! What do you want to know?”
“Same thing I wanted yesterday. Where’s the rest of the Circle?” I toss the gun onto the bed. God, I want a cigarette. “Let’s try a different approach. You’re right here, so where’s Jayne-Anne?”
If Donald Trump and the Wicked Witch of the West had a kid, it would be Jayne-Anne. She looks like a librarian with some money and good taste in clothes, but underneath the Versace, she’s Godzilla with tits. She isn’t as powerful a magician as Mason, but next to him she’s the most focused and ruthless and, in her way, scarier than bad dog Parker.
“I don’t know. I heard she’s got some kind of movie-business gig.”
“What about Cherry Moon?”
Crack open a pedophile’s piñata and Cherry Moon is the candy that falls out. She’s a Lollipop Doll, one of a gang of girls who take their manga and anime a little too seriously. They all want to grow up to be Sailor Moon and Cherry had the magical skill to do it. Last time I saw her, she was in High Gothic Lolita drag, radiating rough sex and looking all of twelve years old.
“Also don’t know about her. Someone said she’s running some kind of spa or plastic surgery thing for rich assholes.”
“I’m glad to hear that everyone’s using their new power for such worthy causes.”
“We’ve all gotta eat. Not me right now, but generally.”
“Where’s TJ?”
He rolls his eyes when I say the name. “That fucking hippie. After the Lurkers grabbed you, he bawled like a little girl for days. Some people aren’t cut out for real life.”
“Lurker” is what the Sub Rosa call any secretive magical, mystical, or monstrous freak that isn’t them. A naiad is a Lurker. So are zombies and werewolves. Undercover cops are secretive and sometimes monsters, but they aren’t Lurkers. They’re just pricks.
“Where is he?”
“Sucking dirt in Woodlawn. The little faggot hung himself a week after you went bye-bye. Guess he couldn’t get the monsters out of his head.”
Poor dumb kid. TJ was even younger than me. He would have been sixteen or seventeen back then. But Kasabian is right about one thing; some people aren’t built to see the dark side of magic or deal with the vicious parts of life. TJ never belonged in our little wolf pack. In a way, I was glad he was gone. I hadn’t been looking forward to hunting him down.
“I guess we covered Mason and Parker last night. Mason’s gone and he took Parker with him. Do I have that right?”
“Yeah. And don’t ask me about them because I don’t know. People see Parker around town sometimes. Usually right before some other nosy magician gets his neck broken.”
The thought of an attack dog like Parker and a Darth Vader wannabe like Mason running wild with heads full of Hellion hoodoo does not take me to a happy place. And the two of them could be holed up anywhere, from Glendale to Bhutan.
“You been out to the old house yet? Pretty, isn’t it?”
“What happened to it?”
“Don’t know. Maybe Mason took the house with him. Did you find anything good when you went inside?”
“Inside what? The house is gone. What’s there to find?”
“You simple son of a bitch. The basement’s still there. You’ve got to go underground.” Kasabian gives me an appraising look. “What, did you just drive up and leave? Pretty tough, tough guy.”
Beautiful. Now I have to burrow like a groundhog into Mason’s basement to the same room where he summoned those things to take me Downtown. Nothing can possibly go wrong with this plan.
When I turn to leave, Kasabian yells at me.
“Hey, asshole. I gave you information. At least let me have a cigarette.”
“I’m out, so tonight we both suffer. I’ll pick up more tomorrow.”
I step out of the closet, and just before I close the door, I say, “I almost forgot. Your car was parked in a two-hour zone and I was afraid you were going to get a ticket, so I gave your car away.”
“You what?”
“Sweet dreams.”
I SIT ON the edge of the bed wanting a cigarette, but unable to summon the will to go out and find a store that’s still open. The bullets in my chest ache, almost like someone shot them in there. I think one of the slugs is scraping against a rib. I get up and scrounge around the room, moving furniture, opening cabinets, and digging through piles of empty DVD cases. Finally, at the bottom of a box filled with mangled porn tapes—I don’t want to even think about how they got that way—I find a bottle of cheap, no name vodka in a plastic screw-top bottle. In high school, we called drinks like this Devil’s Rain after an old horror movie. That strikes me as pretty funny, under the circumstances. I screw off the top and take a drink. The vodka burns my throat, and tastes like Windex and battery acid.
I can’t believe that some small, ridiculous part of me feels kind of sorry for a pig like Kasabian. To spend your whole life brownnosing and riding on the coattails of smarter and more talented magicians, then having them dump you like the prom date who wouldn’t put out right as they become infused with who knows what kind of power, has to sting. It has to be the final confirmation of all your worst fears, that you really are the chump you were always afraid you might be.
I, on the other hand, was exactly the prick Kasabian said I was. While he was struggling with kindergarten levitations and Mason was compulsively showing off some new spirit conjuration or fire blast, I bullshitted my way through magic the way I bullshitted my way through everything else, pretty well.
Magic really was always easy for me. At my fifth birthday party, I floated the family cat over to Tiffany Brown, a redhead I had a crush on, and dropped it on her. Tiffany didn’t get the joke and that was the end of my first romance.
When I was twelve, the teacher had us make clay animals in art class. I squeezed together some fat little birds. Then I made them fly around the room and out the window. I got suspended for a week for that one, though no one could explain to me exactly why.
I didn’t even know I was doing magic back then. All I did know was that I could do funny tricks and make the other kids laugh.
My family never talked about it, but they knew what I could do. I was dangerous when I got sick. I’d break windows with a look. My fevers started fires. I only learned that what I was doing had a name when my father gave me an old, leather-bound book titled A Concise History and Outline of the Magickal Arts. I knew right away what I was. Not a warlock or a wizard. That was Disney stuff to me. I was a magician. A few years later, I found out there were other magicians and some invited me into their tight little Circle. Then they tried to kill me.
Sitting on Kasabian’s bed, drinking his lousy vodka, I can picture Jayne-Anne, Cherry, Parker, and Mason sitting high above the city in one of those houses that hangs over the side of a hill on spindly spider legs, daring the earth to throw an earthquake
