Secondhand Souls

  “They believed that?”

  “They love having an answer.”

  They walked back to the trunk.

  “You got bolt cutters?” asked Minty Fresh, shooting a glance over his shoulder toward the steel doors.

  “Yeah, but I think we can probably climb over. They’re what, eight feet tall? I’m not that old.”

  “I ain’t worried about getting in, but if shit go sideways, I sure don’t want to have to get over those motherfuckers in a hurry getting out.”

  Rivera ticked off a point well-made in the air, pulled the bolt cutters from the trunk, and leaned them against the bumper. He handed Minty Fresh a light flak vest. “Blade-­resistant,” he said. “Prison guards wear them. Should fit, just may not cover you all the way down.”

  Minty Fresh shrugged off his leather coat and the double shoulder holsters with the massive Desert Eagle pistols. He put on the vest.

  “Turn,” Rivera said. “Lift your arms.” The Mint One did as instructed and Rivera cinched the vest up tight on him. Minty put on his shoulder holsters, buckled them down, then his coat. Rivera held up a riot helmet. “I guessed at the size.”

  Minty Fresh looked at the helmet like it was a foul dead thing. “Yeah, I ain’t wearing that.”

  “It’s Kevlar. Lights and goggles. You said one of them flings venom from her claws.”

  Minty Fresh pulled a pair of wraparound sunglasses from the breast pocket of his coat, flicked them open, and put them on.

  “Going to be dark in there.”

  “I have excellent night vision.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Rivera. He put on his own helmet and pulled down the goggles.

  Rivera handed Minty some orange foam earplugs. “You’re going to want these.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  Rivera grinned, looking—­in all the tactical gear—­like a victorious soldier in the tooth-­whitening wars. He reached into the trunk and pulled back the flap on a nylon satchel, revealing a row of grenades clipped into elastic straps. “Flash bangs. Trust me, you’re going to want earplugs.”

  Minty smiled. “We going to throw grenades in the park and 911 going to tell ­people we’re animal control?”

  “Aren’t we?”

  Minty held out his palm and Rivera dropped the earplugs. Rivera handed him a riot shotgun with a pistol grip, a laser sight on the top, and a flashlight slung under the barrel. “You ever use one of these?”

  “I have.”

  “Semiautomatic, just click off the safety and pull the trigger. I have double-­ought buckshot in them. They’ll tear the hell out of whatever they hit, but they’re not Magnum loads, so they’ll kick less, and if you have to shoot quickly you’ll still be able to aim. You have nine shots with one in the chamber, five each extra on the elastic on the stock, four on the forestock.” He pulled a box of shells from the trunk. “You want some extras for your jacket pocket?”

  Minty Fresh laughed. “No, Inspector, I think eighteen shots and our handguns are either going to do the trick or we gonna get done.”

  Rivera nodded and shrugged off his sport coat, revealing the Beretta slung in a shoulder holster under his left arm, two extra clips under his right. He was checking for the tenth time that each was loaded when he heard gravel crunching and a silver-­blue Honda pulled up in front of his Ford. He checked his watch.

  “I thought you told him seven, it’s barely six-­fifteen.”

  “I did,” said Fresh.

  Charlie Asher climbed out of Audrey’s Honda and stood by the door. “You guys are ready already?” He wore a leather jacket and was carrying a black cane with a silver handle, but otherwise he looked like Mike Sullivan out to buy a paper.

  “How’s the old lady?” asked Rivera.

  “She’s stable. Heart attack. Her son is there.”

  “But alive,” said Rivera. He looked at Minty Fresh.

  “That’s good,” said Minty, meaning more than it was good that she was alive, it was good that Lemon had attacked her and she’d managed to survive it. It meant Lemon was vulnerable.

  “Where’s the Emperor?” Charlie asked.

  “Jail,” said Rivera.

  “Really?”

  “Just until this is over. Actually I had them lock him in a cage at the animal shelter so his men could stay with him. They owed me a favor.”

  Charlie joined them at the back of the Ford. “My motocross leathers got all cut up when I—­when Mike jumped off the bridge, so I only have this jacket. Should be okay, right?”

  “Yeah, you ain’t going to need them,” said Minty Fresh.

  “Go home to your daughter, Charlie,” Rivera said.

  “What are you talking about? This is my battle. I’m not a afraid of them. I’ve done this before.”

  “We know,” said Rivera. “That’s not even the issue. You have to go back to Audrey and your daughter and your sister because you have them to go back to.”

  “We don’t,” said Minty Fresh.

  “I have guns now. Look at these bad boys,” Charlie said, flexing his biceps. “I didn’t have these before.”

  “Have you ever been to the animal shelter, Charlie?” Rivera said. “I could show you around.”

  “Go home, Charlie,” said Minty Fresh. “I didn’t go to all that trouble to bring you back to life so you could get killed again. If something happen to me, you look out for Lily, you hear?”

  “You know I will.” Charlie slumped, knowing he was defeated. They had decided this long before now. If he hadn’t shown up early, it would all be over by now. And they had a point. He had charged into battle against the Morrigan once before, and Sophie had lost her daddy for a year. He couldn’t do that to her again.

  “Well, at least take this with you.” Charlie held out the cane. “It’s my sword cane.”

  “We look like we need more weapons?”

  “It was my soul vessel—where my soul went before Audrey put it into that little body. It might be good luck or something.”

  “Didn’t you have this with you when you got killed?” the Mint One asked.

  “Kind of.”

  Minty took the cane from him and tucked it into his belt. “Thank you.”

  “Give a brother a pound?” Charlie held out his fist to receive a pound. The Mint One left him hanging.

  “Don’t do that,” said Minty.

  “Sorry.” Charlie turned to Rivera, started to go in for a hug, which Rivera intercepted and turned into a handshake. “Something happens, you can have my suits,” he said.

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” said Charlie.

  Rivera smiled. “If you’re going to stay out here, tell anyone who comes up that we’re animal control and they should move along because of the chemicals.”

  “What chemicals?”

  “The dangerous imaginary ones,” he said. Rivera looked to Minty Fresh. “You ready?”

  Rivera started for the doors, Minty Fresh followed, the bolt cutters in one hand, the shotgun in the other.

  Minty Fresh said, “Are you absolutely sure you want to do this? Seems like maybe it would make more sense to call in a SWAT team or Special Forces.”

  “That won’t work, isn’t Special Forces where everyone gets a hug?” Charlie called.

  “That’s the Special Olympics,” Rivera said over his shoulder. To Minty he said, “How are you going to explain this, the Morrigan?”

  “Just so we’re clear, then,” said the Mint One, “we’re only doing this because we want to avoid an awkward explanation to other police, right?”

  Rivera paused. “No. We’re doing this because they murdered my partner and I don’t think they’re going to come along quietly if I try to arrest them. They’re going to come for us, eventually, and if we wait, it will be on their terms. Now is better.”

 
“You don’t never be lyin’,” said Minty Fresh. He stopped at the doors and leaned the shotgun against the concrete wall. “Do you smell something burning?

  “Oh, hell,” said Rivera. He cringed and braced himself.

  “AIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” called the banshee.

  Minty Fresh dropped the bolt cutters, snatched up his shotgun, and brought the sight down on the sooty wraith.

  “Don’t shoot her, don’t shoot her, don’t shoot her.” Rivera stepped away from the banshee and pushed down the barrel of Minty Fresh’s shotgun.

  “What do you think you’re doing, ya ninny?” said the banshee. “Ya can’t go in there.”

  “We have to,” said Rivera.

  “I tried to warn your great fat friend, and ya know how that turned out. And the harpies are even stronger now than they were then.”

  “I know. Thank you,” said Rivera. “But we have to do this.”

  “Fine. I’ll nae sing at your funeral, you bloody loony.” The stun gun crackled in the air and she was gone.

  “She thinks it’s a box of lightning,” Rivera explained. “She thinks it adds drama to her entrances and exits.”

  “Right, ’cause what the bitch need is more drama.”

  Because the Morrigan were goddesses of war, they were attracted to the sound of war drums. So when they first rose in the modern world, a pocket of the Underworld opened under the rumbling boom they followed. As it turned out, they had entered the world under a bowling alley, and it was there that they absorbed the dialect of English that they now spoke.

  “This sucks,” said Babd. “I don’t know why we have to stay down here now.” She was reclining in the bucket of a skip-­loader, methodically licking the last remnants of some Squirrel Person from her claws.

  They were all strong, and lithe, and they shimmered in the dim light of the tunnel like swaths of starry night. Macha leaned against the tunnel wall and preened her breast with her claws, retracted to the length of a cat’s claws.

  “We can go into the light,” said Nemain, who was crouched over a wolf spider, dripping venom from her talon as the creature tried to escape, then blocking its path with another sizzling drop as it bolted the other way. “What does Yama know?”

  They had flown in their raven forms to the tunnel while it was still dark. Bloated with the power of new souls, moving again as shadows was beyond them, at least for a while.

  “We could find the rest of the soul stealers,” said Babd. “Take their souls. Kill them.”

  “Yama says if we go into the light we’ll attract the attention of humans,” said Nemain.

  “I thought that was the point,” said Macha. “Have our names on their breath as they die. Have them cower when a raven passes over them.”

  “Why can’t we just kill everybody?” said Babt, pouting.

  An inhuman shriek sounded from the far end of the tunnel.

  Nemain impaled the spider she’d been torturing with her talon and stood. “Did you hear that?”

  Babd climbed out of the skip-­loader basket, looked down the tunnel around the column of heavy machinery. “There’s too much light. Someone’s moving down there.”

  “Snacks,” said Macha, grinning in anticipation, her fangs showing against her lower lips.

  Something clattered against the wall on Macha’s left and fell at her feet, it looked like a green soup can. Another object rattled and bounced down the other side of the tractor and settled a few feet from Babd.

  The flash bangs exploded. Deafening concussion. Blinding light. Babd was thrown back into the bucket of the skip-­loader. Macha staggered, spun, bouncing off the wall, her arms up by her ears as she willed them not to turn into wings to flee—­not in the tunnel.

  Babd shrieked, her most ferocious battle cry, the call that had made warriors soil themselves and cower in terror on the battlefield as their enemies harvested their heads. She was answered with a flash and a shot and her left arm was shredded. Another shot, her foot blown out from under her.

  “You fuckers!” Her scream resonated in the metal of the machines.

  On the opposite side of the tunnel Macha fell into a crouch, having deduced where the attack was coming from. A light and a red dot panned up the side of the tunnel, settled on her as she dove and the projectiles took her full in the side, rolling her over in the air to land against the bucket of the skip-­loader.

  Nemain fell between the unused train tracks. Light and lasers and explosive fire were blazing down either side of the tractor in front of her. She watched as parts of her sisters were shaken and shredded with impact. Flares smelling of sulfur came bouncing down the tunnel and projected shadows of her sisters’ torment across the ceiling. She scuttled forward under the tractor, rolled onto her back, pulled herself up onto the driveshaft, and hung there, perhaps a foot off the ground, as the conflagration raged on either side of her. Fear was foreign to her—­in a thousand years on and over the battlefields of the North she’d never had to defend herself. It was war, someone was going to die and she was Death; it had always been win-­win.

  The roar of gunfire paused. Human footfalls, the hiss of the burning flares, a mechanical clicking noise. Light beams bouncing in the sulfur smoke.

  “Anything?” A man’s voice.

  “Something on my side headed away—­further down the tunnel.”

  “One here, too. The tunnel is walled up at the other end, heavy ­wooden slats, into Fort Mason parking lot. Reloading.” Click. Click. Click.

  Then she saw them, human legs moving up the tunnel, one man on either side of her, the one on her right closer. Take down one and then make a dash after Macha and Babd.

  The one on the right, then, in the green leather. She unsheathed her claws on that side to their full length. Venom dripped and softly sizzled on a steel rail below . . .

  Minty Fresh was trying to keep the light on the shotgun pointed down the tunnel as he pushed fresh shells into the tubular magazine, which made his grip on the gun precarious at best. When the Morrigan’s claws struck his calf, he lost his grip on the shotgun and fumbled it away, the light bouncing around the tunnel like an epileptic Tinker Bell.

  He pulled away from the pain and his feet were yanked out from under him. He landed hard on his side, his breath knocked out, and he felt himself being yanked under the tractor. With one hand he caught a piece of metal that protruded from the front wheel of the tractor, a steering bar, perhaps, while he swung a fist at his attacker, hitting nothing.

  Rivera shouting. White pain in his leg. Frantic digging in his coat with his free hand for one of the Desert Eagles. He touched one, was yanked, lost orientation, reached again. His free hand whipped around, settled on something round—­at first he thought another piece of the tractor—­but it was Charlie Asher’s sword cane. He pulled it free from the scabbard and swung in the direction of his attacker as hard as he could.

  A screech, not Rivera. The grip on his calf gone, he fell slack on the train tracks. A shotgun firing, a figure, illuminated by the highway flares, rolling out from under the tractor, awkwardly scrambling to her feet. Another shotgun blast and she was spun around, fell, and scuttled off into the dark screeching.

  “You okay?” asked Rivera, his face appearing by a wheel on the opposite side of the tractor.

  “Yeah. The fuck?” Now, on the ground by his leg, he saw the severed claw of the Morrigan twitching, evaporating into a feathery vapor spewing from the severed wrist until, in a few seconds, it was gone. “She got my leg.”

  Rivera ran around the front of the tractor, crouched beside the Mint One. He pulled a flashlight out of his vest, played it over Minty Fresh, set it on the ground pointing at his leg. The blood looked like tar. Rivera took off his belt and wrapped it around Minty’s leg just above the knee, tightened it down, putting his foot on it for the tension. “Hold this. Tight.” He handed the free end of the belt to
Minty Fresh.

  “Go get them,” Fresh said.

  Rivera shook his head, dug his phone out of his jacket pocket, checked the signal. “Fuck. I’m going to have to go back out to get a signal and call help.”

  Rivera helped Minty Fresh sit up against the tractor wheel, then took the end of his belt from the big man and tied it off. He picked up his own shotgun and handed it to Minty. “Two still in it, the extras still on the stock.”

  “Yeah, reloading might have been my mistake,” said Minty.

  “I’ll be back.”

  Rivera picked up his flashlight and stood. As soon as the light played back toward the entrance he saw the new, fitter Charlie Asher coming out of the darkness. “A really scary-­looking woman in black rags told me you guys might need help,” Charlie said.

  “Grab an arm,” Rivera said. “We need to get him out of here.” He looked down to see that Minty Fresh was unconscious.

  25

  The Death Card

  Charlie hadn’t told Audrey he was going to attack the Morrigan—­he hadn’t told her anyone was going to attack the Morrigan. The last she had heard about it, the attack was theoretical, Inspector Rivera blowing off steam, she’d thought.

  Charlie had taken a taxi home from the hospital after Mrs. Korjev’s son had arrived from Los Angeles, and let himself into the new apartment, which still smelled of paint and cleaning products. He crawled into bed with Audrey and kissed her awake enough to tell her that Mrs. Korjev was stable, and for her to tell him that Sophie was sleeping in her own bed in the other apartment, but she hadn’t told him anything else.

  They made love and she flinched once when he brushed against her ankle, which was raw from where she’d been duct-­taped by the Squirrel ­People, but she’d passed the movement off as passion and she fell asleep in his arms, feeling safe for the first time in days. She had awakened when he rose at dawn, went right back to sleep when he kissed her on the temple and crept out of the apartment, leaving a note on the breakfast bar that said, Had to go out. Will call you in a ­couple of hours. Tell Sophie I love her. Love, Charlie. Not, Going to engage the powers of darkness, because that worked out so well the last time. Not, I’m a complete moron with no common sense and no consideration for the ­people who love me. No, just, Had to go out. So when he called her around seven and said he was headed to San Francisco General Hospital because that’s where the ambulance was taking Minty Fresh and he would pick her up outside in five minutes, well, she’d been a bit surprised, and a little angry.