Usually getting shot doesn’t take this much out of me. I don’t ever want to go backstage with a bullet in my arm again. I have to start the car with my left hand and mostly drive home to Hollywood that way. I take surface streets. It’s longer getting back, but there’s less chance of me taking a gimpy turn and driving off an overpass.
There’s a parking space near the Museum of Death, so I take it. It’s a metered spot, but all my change is in my right pocket. Looks like Julie is going to get a parking ticket in the mail. Fuck it. Let her take it out of my next paycheck.
I hump the jar and the rest of the loot, still wrapped in my coat, across to the hotel. I can’t reach my keys, so I kick the door to our room a few times. Candy opens up and turns sideways. Or maybe it’s me turning sideways. Someone is definitely moving at a funny angle. I decide it’s me when something slams into my nose and I get a faceful of hotel carpet. I want to explain what happened, but when I open my mouth, all that comes out is “Who was the guy who sang the flying horse song?”
WHEN I COME to, I’m in bed and everyone is staring at me strangely, like I’m the Fiji mermaid in spats.
My right arm and leg are wrapped in fresh bandages. I can smell one of Allegra’s healing potions through the bandages. She’s taking my pulse. Vidocq is behind her. Kasabian and Vincent are behind him and Candy is at the foot of the bed.
“I had the strangest dream,” I say. “And you and you and you were there.”
“Shut up, Dorothy,” says Candy. “You weren’t supposed to get shot tonight. You were supposed to watch Tamerlan and come home.”
“I was watching him. Then some crazy Nazi started shooting at me.”
“No wonder, with all the junk we found in your pockets. What, you couldn’t fit his refrigerator in there?”
“Did you find the present I got you? Brass knuckles.”
“Did you look at them? The knuckles have swastikas on them. I don’t want them.”
“Damn. I missed that.”
“What’s in that big jar?”
I look around for Vincent. He’s next to Kasabian.
“I found your heart.”
“You did? You mean Townsend’s heart.”
“It doesn’t matter whose heart it is. It’s how they bound you. If we put it back, you’ll be your old self again.”
“How do we put it back?”
“How did they take it out?”
“Oh,” he says.
“You can’t be serious,” says Allegra. “You can’t just cut him open and start shoving organs inside.”
“I can’t. But you can.”
“Forget it.”
“Listen, if we don’t get rid of McCarthy by dawn, the White Lights will own death. They’ll decide who lives and who dies and when. It’s the ultimate racket.”
“Are you sure about this?” says Vidocq.
“Yes. We don’t have long to fix things. What time is it?”
“A little after three,” says Candy.
“Dawn is only a few hours off. We can’t fuck around arguing. Vincent, are you ready for this?”
He has a hand on his chest.
“Yes. I want to go back.”
Allegra shakes her head.
“This is ridiculous. I won’t do it.”
I sit up. The room spins, but I don’t fall over. I’m pretty hard to kill, and heal quicker than a civilian. I test my right arm. It straightens out about three-quarters of the way. It hurts, but I don’t pass out. I try raising it and get it as far as my shoulder.
I say, “If you won’t do it, I will. Come on, Vincent. This is probably going to be messy. Why don’t you get in the bathtub?”
He sighs.
“All right. Will it hurt?”
“The bathtub? No. It’ll be cold.”
“No. The cutting.”
“Did it hurt when you woke up with your heart gone?”
“No. I simply felt . . . disembodied. As if I was in Townsend and somewhere else at the same time.”
“There you go. This is going to be a breeze.”
“Stop it. Both of you,” says Allegra.
She looks at Vincent.
“You can’t let this idiot hack you open.”
She turns to me.
“And you can’t just slice people up like an Easter ham.”
“Then who’s going to do it?”
She looks at Vidocq. He leans down and they whisper to each other. Allegra looks back at me.
“I’ll do it,” she says. “But you should stay in bed and heal.”
“I’ll heal later. Just give me something that will get me through the night so Vincent and I can finish this.”
“Wait. What happens after you put Vincent’s heart back?” says Candy. “I thought you said he’d be Death again.”
“He will. But that means there will be two Deaths. We have to kill the other.”
“Why do you have to go with him?”
“In case something goes wrong. Because something always goes wrong.”
“I don’t want you to go,” she says.
“I don’t have any choice.”
I look at the others.
“Are you going to go? Or you? Or you? No. I’m the only one who’s faced anything like this.”
“You’re a wreck. Please don’t do this,” Candy says.
“You said it yourself, people always get hurt around me. That includes me. I made it back from Hell twice. The second time just to see you. I can make it back from this. Besides, Vincent will look out for me. Right?”
He nods.
“Right,” he says in the least reassuring tone possible.
Candy shakes her head.
“Fine. And when Julie calls to get our reports I’ll tell her she can’t have yours because you took our client to the land of the dead.”
“You can tell her I’m solving the fucking case. That’s what she wants.”
“She doesn’t want you dead.”
“Maybe not, but let’s be honest. What she really wants is the credit for saving Death. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Candy doesn’t say anything.
“Let’s get going,” I say. “Vincent, you strip and get in the tub. Allegra will get her tools and I’ll get the heart.”
Candy might be mad at me, but she looks more like I’m on my way to the gallows. She helps me up and I have to lean on her for support until I get my balance. I look at Vidocq.
“What do you have for a man who needs to keep moving no matter what for a few hours?”
He reaches into his coat and pulls out a small clear bottle full of a red liquid.
“Malefic baneberry. It doesn’t taste good, but one teaspoon and a skeleton would dance a jig.”
He takes out the cork and hands me the bottle.
“To the Führer’s mustache,” I say, and down it all.
Malefic is a nice word for what it tastes like. I want to spit it out, but it feels like my mouth and throat have sealed shut. The room spins. I sway. Candy grabs my good shoulder. Then I’m enveloped in warmth and the room stops moving. My mouth works and I can breathe again. I feel great, ready to run a marathon and wrestle Rodan.
“How do you feel?”
I lean over and kiss Candy.
“Not bad at all.”
Candy pushes me away and spits.
“It tastes like you gargled vinegar and ammonia.”
“Sorry. I just feel good.”
“You better pray you come back, and when you do, hit the toothpaste before you get near me.”
I look at Vincent.
“You ready?”
He’s standing in the middle of the room naked. Turns and heads for the bathroom. Allegra gets her medical bag and I get the jar. Everyone follows us.
Vincent lies down in the tub as Allegra lays out her surgical tools. She swabs Vincent’s chest with antiseptic, running her hand over the ugly scar where his heart was cut out. She selects a small scalpel from her kit.
“Are you ready?” she says to Vincent.
He nods.
She takes out a potion and rubs it on his chest.
“This will numb the area. You won’t feel anything,” Allegra says.
He nods. She gives me a dirty look.
“You better be right about all this.”
“I am.”
She turns back to Vincent and makes a straight incision across the scar.
“Does that hurt?” she says.
“I barely feel it,” says Vincent.
Her medical kit used to belong to Doc Kinski, an archangel. It isn’t exactly a regular kit. I don’t recognize half the instruments. She uses things that look like knitting needles and an astrolabe to open Vincent’s chest and hold it open.
And there it is. The same broken ribs and his sternum over the deep red hole. Vincent cranes his head down to see the opening. He doesn’t like what he sees and lies back in the tub.
“You have my heart?” he says.
I open the jar. Until this moment, it hasn’t occurred to me to make sure it’s inside. I reach in and touch something wet. Pull out a big fistful of long, thin leaves. Graveyard tree, a common poison in old Eastern European Sub Rosa families. I peel back the leaves to reveal a thick mass of gray muscle. Townsend’s heart does not look in tip-top shape. While I peel off the rest of the leaves, Vincent sings quietly. “Mack the Knife” from The Threepenny Opera. Kasabian hums along.
“I don’t exactly know what’s going to happen when I do this. You ready?” I say.
He nods, still singing.
I lean over his open chest with the heart.
“Stark,” says Allegra.
“Yeah?”
“You’re putting it in backward.”
I turn the heart around.
“Thanks.”
With one hand on the edge of the tub, I push Townsend’s gray, dead heart into Vincent’s chest.
Instantly, it begins to beat. Blood vessels, arteries, and ventricles stretch to meet each other. Blood begins to flow. The heart turns red. Vincent doesn’t move.
“How do you feel?” I say.
Vincent turns to look at me. The whites of his eyes gradually fill with blood, turning a burning red.
“Fine,” he says. “Better by the second.”
His voice is different. Lower. It sort of ripples, deep and slow, like he’s speaking through heavy sluggish water.
Allegra looks at me like she’s saying, Is that normal?
I shrug.
Vincent sits up in the tub, pulls Allegra’s tools off. The skin on his chest knits itself shut.
“Thank you,” he says. “All of you.”
“You okay to travel?” I say.
He stands.
“Can we go now?”
“Give me a minute.”
I find my coat and go through the pockets.
Back with Vincent, I pop the pomegranate seed in my mouth. I nod. Vincent, still naked, starts to fade away. Candy comes over and hugs me. I put my good arm around her. Then bite down on the seed.
My vision shifts like someone jerked my head all the way around. I’m in L.A., but it’s a junked, almost nuked place. Trash and burned-out cars in the streets. Empty storefronts. The dead city just beyond Tenebrae Station. Vincent is waiting for me.
“This way,” says.
We walk through the pagoda-like Chinatown gate, go a few blocks through town and across the twisted, useless metro line tracks. In regular L.A., this would be the Los Angeles State Historic Park. Here, it’s the beginning of the desert. The real land of the dead. Tenebrae city is for the spirits that don’t want to pass over. A literal ghost town. The desert is where the other souls are divided up and sent—let’s face it—mainly to Hell.
A half mile across the dry, cracked plain, a dust devil reaches into the sky. I stop for a minute, but Vincent keeps walking. I have to trot a few steps to catch up.
“You ready for this?”
He doesn’t say anything for a full minute.
“This Death has taken my place, but he has no idea what he’s doing,” Vincent says.
“What do you mean?”
“He handles souls like a butcher handling sausages. You don’t pull them from life. You escort them, giving them their dignity and easing their fears.”
“I don’t think dignity and good vibes are high on McCarthy’s agenda.”
Vincent looks at me like he’s never seen me before.
“Yes” is all he says.
As we get closer, I see what he means about manhandling the dead. Souls hang in the sky. Row upon row of them, as far as I can see, a whole nation of uncollected spirits. The dust devil sends out whirling tendrils to the souls, yanks them out of the sky, and drops them, like a drunk picking apples. The stunned souls wake up on the ground having no idea what’s going on. With no one to guide them, most of them probably don’t even know they’re dead. There are thousands of them, wandering the desert. Fucking McCarthy has figured out how to get the dead out of their comas, but not what to do with them yet. He’s just collecting them like porcelain thimbles.
The dust devil plucks a few more souls from the sky and drops them. Then it stops moving. It just swirls, kicking up the dry Tenebrae soil high into the sky. I have a feeling it knows we’re here. I look at Vincent.
“He’ll move soon. Get ready.”
He looks at the whirlwind.
A moment later he says, “I’ve never had a fight.”
He turns to me.
“I’ve argued, but in all the universes I’ve lived through, I’ve never had to fight anyone.”
“It’s easy. You just make a fist and put it in the other guy’s face as fast as you can before he can do it to you.”
He looks at me like I’m suddenly speaking Urdu.
“I don’t know how. This was a mistake. I’m useless.”
“Calm down, man.”
The dust devil lurches and the sky fades to moonless dark. It whirls faster and skims across the desert in our direction. Lightning flashes. I swear I can see the vague outline of Edison Elijah McCarthy’s stupid face in the flashes.
Vincent says, “I don’t know what to do.”
I move my right arm, testing my right shoulder. It’s stiff but moves.
“That’s okay. I do.”
I take the black blade from my boot, start cutting a magic circle in the dusty plain. The vacant souls have seen us and are following the dust devil as it skims forward.
I work fast, cutting runes, spells, and sigils into the ground.
The dust devil bears down on us, a Mack truck of whirling crystal dust that will cut skin—my skin in this case—to beef jerky. When it’s still fifty yards away I pull Vincent into the circle and shout Hellion hoodoo as loud as I can.
The dust devil convulses, like I kneed it in the balls. Lightning goes mad, cuts across the sky, explodes into the ground. Panicked souls scatter. The dust devil recovers, whirls in place, puffing itself up bigger than ever, and heads for us again.
Vincent takes a step back.
“What do we do?”
“First off, we don’t step outside the circle.”
Vincent quickly gets back inside the circle.
“What else?”
“We’ll figure that out as we go along.”
He sings quietly to himself, but the wind is too loud for me to make out what the tune is.
I bark more hoodoo, a mix of hexes I learned Downtown, and shit, I’m just improvising.
A wall of fire explodes before the whirlwind. It
stops and shrinks back. Lightning smashes up the ground. Cuts deep black gashes in the desert floor until the bolts plunge into the fire itself. And sucks them up like a goddamn thousand-foot-tall shop vac. The flames swirl inside the dust devil. It glows like neon, and this time there’s no question. It illuminates McCarthy’s face.
The bastard is smiling.
He throws lightning bolts down at us. They explode around the edges of the circle, turning the air to ozone and making my skin tingle. Vincent flinches. He isn’t singing anymore.
McCarthy rushes across the desert floor, moving over and around and completely surrounding us in his whirling, choking body. Desert dust clogs my nose and burns my eyes. Vincent has his hands over his face. He turns in a circle like he wants to run, but doesn’t know where to go. He stumbles and falls. I pull him to his feet.
“Don’t let this guy get to you,” I say. “You’re Death and you’re as powerful as he is and you’ve been around longer. You know more tricks than him.”
“I still don’t know how to fight.”
“Everybody knows how to fight. It’s called survival instinct. I have it and so do you or you would have given up by now.”
Vincent looks up at the whirlwind that engulfs us, not impressed with my pep talk.
“Go get him,” I say. “This is all tricks. You’re the real Death. Reach up and pull his fucking heart out.”
Vincent wipes dirt from his eyes and walks to the edge of the circle.
“I am Death,” he says in a booming voice I never knew he had inside him. “Leave this place and these souls, liar. Usurper. You belong here as just another ordinary soul, nothing more.”
Vincent reaches into the whirlwind. And gets thrown backward like a crash-test dummy. I try to catch him, but we both land in a heap.
He looks up at me.
“I’m sorry.”
I help him up.
“It’s okay.”
“I know I can do more, but I can’t remember how. My powers feel like they’ve been gone for a million years. This flesh has me trapped.”
“Let me do this,” I say, and take off running.
I manifest my Gladius and run to the edge of the circle, plunge it into the dust devil. The blowing sand feels like I shoved my hand into a garbage disposal. My skin feels like it’s peeling off in layers. Lightning bursts above my head. But McCarthy roils and convulses. Parts of the whirlwind shear off, man-size whirlwinds that blow across the plain and scatter to dust. The wind howls, like a man screaming in pain. I pull out the Gladius and shove it into the wind again, deeper. In a second, I feel McCarthy begin to pull back. The whirlwind shrinks around the circle and moves away in a slow retreat. I keep the Gladius buried deep in its gut, feeling good, knowing I have McCarthy on the ropes.