“Oh, yes, do.” Gianna shifted in her chair to face me full on, her narrowed eyes flashing a cat-like green as the light caught them. “And make this good, dear, or all the impressive entrances in the world won’t get you out of here alive.”

I paused with my cigarette at my lips, the shadow purring in the back of my head, oozing confidence. She didn’t see Gianna as any kind of threat to us whatsoever. Not with me armed to the teeth and her all well-fed and strong.

Right, I thought at her. What about Irish? And Larry?

I felt her surprise at this thought, and hit my cigarette, drawing a deep lungful of harsh smoke. Her surprise made me second-guess the question, and it suddenly occurred to me that it had been an extremely long time since I’d bothered giving much thought to getting anyone besides myself out of trouble. I frowned, staring at Gianna, who was staring at me. Two flat, contemplative, empty gazes meeting each other like snakes glaring at each other in the desert sun.

“You know what the Knights are dealing with?” I asked, sitting up a little straighter in the chair as I tried to remember at least one other time in my life I’d put some effort into getting more than my own ass out of the fire. I could feel the shadow boggling at me as I thought about it.

“Gustavo complained about something. What of it?” Gianna paused to inspect her nails as Robert set the glass down on the end table at her side. It was steaming in the chilly air.

“Will you people sit down?” I said, waving at Irish as I came up short on my quick trip down memory lane. Seriously? Not one other time? That was a little embarrassing. Oh, sure, I’d done favors in the past. But only when it was easy, or when I could expect to be repaid. I’d even let my husbands fend for themselves, which got one of them dead and another to divorce me for his own good. Gene had done all right, but then Gene had been a tough little guy, apart from that iffy heart of his. Thing was, I’d never looked out for him. I’d never had to.

Irish and Larry pulled up a pair of chairs, settling down seated near me, so that the three of us faced Gianna across the coffee table. Mikey stood against the wall, next to Robert, looking serious and patient and a little worried. Larry had taken off his sunglasses, and was looking at me as though I were some kind of superhero. As though I had all the answers.

I’d almost killed him just a couple of minutes ago, out of idle curiosity and okay, maybe because he’d had the audacity to feel sorry for me when we were talking in the car. But it wasn’t fear I saw he looked at me, even though he was easily smart enough to know how close he’d come to dying. It was admiration.

Great, now I really felt about two inches tall. What was it Randall had said when I’d made that quip about protecting my city? Something about how I didn’t have an altruistic bone in my body. I hated that he was right.

The vampiress cleared her throat and kicked irritably at a wisp of shadow that had been lingering near her ankle. “You were saying?” she prompted, and I was almost grateful for the excuse to stop examining my shortcomings as a human being.

“A jackass by the name of Carl Meiter decided to try for the big time by summoning an outlander. You know what that is?”

Gianna arced an eyebrow, looking up from her manicured nails. “I may have heard that term before.”

“Yeah? Well, he succeeded. Took him awhile – he was a geomancer, so he practically had to rearrange the whole fucking city to build up the power to manage it, but he did it.” I reached down, and scooped some of the drifting shadows up onto the tabletop. They coalesced, darkened, and formed a vague map of the city – it was easy to make out the shape of the river, and when I beckoned with a finger, the buildings on the riverfront grew up in three dimensions.

“All the construction these last few years?”

“That’s my guess,” I said, giving Irish a quick look, then back to Gianna. He leaned over the table, and tapped his finger down on the near East side. A puff of shadow rose and dissipated around the impact.

“And the demolitions here, and here,” another puff of impact in Sterling Heights and Hamtramck. “Other areas that should have been renovated and inexplicably weren’t here, and here. Housing projects in neighborhoods that didn’t need them, and unchecked urban decay in areas that desperately needed new investments.” Irish scowled. “His connections in City Hall and the zoning commission made it easy, and it explains a hell of a lot. New skyscrapers when only forty percent of the office space in Detroit is occupied. Christ Almighty, but he and his cronies drove this city into the ground in their quest for power.”

Larry watched the map on the table like it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. Even so, there was a little crinkle in his forehead, like he was thinking hard. “I won’t get into the sticky details,” I continued, “mainly because I don’t know all the details. But one of the downsides of geomancy is that when you’re building up a big power grid like that, you need other geomancers to watch the other points on your grid. Like surveyors – you need a group of them to make everything accurate. You can substitute out other magicians, like thaumaturges, but you have to have some way of managing those points.”

“Meiter used the city as a power collector? Is that what you’re saying?” Gianna asked. She wasn’t watching the map. She was watching me. “What does this have to do with anything?” Gianna sipped her glass of warm blood, and I resisted the temptation to have the shadow freeze it.

“It was the only way he could work up enough raw power to reach out, grab his outlander, bring it here, and control it. But like I said, he couldn’t do it alone. Ah, that is, unless… a clever way to do it would be to enlist non-mages, and connect them with an artifact.” I dug around in a belt pouch and came out with the ruby ring, holding it up so the light caught the stone and made it gleam. “Like this one, that I got off the corpse of the Deputy Mayor. Benny had one just like it.”

Gianna’s gaze narrowed as she stared at the ring, and Michael cleared his throat. “He did have one of those, Mama. Remember? I was picking on him about –” Gianna raised a hand, and Michael shut his mouth.

“Go on,” she said to me, voice cool.

“The Knights have found half a dozen or more people connected with these rings, all either killed by the hollowman Carl summoned or possessed by Carl himself and burned from the inside out by the power he channeled through them.” I sat back in the chair, suddenly hit by a burst of inspiration. “It’d be hard as hell to make these artifacts so that a normal human could see the lines of force and the channels of magic that Carl’d need them to calibrate for him. But it’d be easy as pie to make them so that Carl could see through the wearer’s eyes. The rings allowed Carl in, which is how he’s getting those bodies!”

Irish looked impressed, and Larry was nodding, which I decided meant that he agreed with me. I grinned myself, pleased to have finally made an important deduction before somebody else beat me to it.

“So this renegade magician is possessing my Benny? Fine. Benny is one of us now, and vampires are not so fragile as humans. Benny won’t burn like the others, will he?”

“Probably not, and that’s part of the problem,” I said, tucking the ring away again. “When Carl touched off his summoning, someone in his little gang wrestled him for control of the beast, and that sent the ritual spinning out of control, and splintered the artifacts, which I’m assuming were also meant to hamstring the outlander long enough for Carl to master it. So instead of Carl gaining the powers of his outlander, the outlander consumed Carl and took over the body.” The shadow-map on the table melted, and from the pool of darkness rose a ten-inch tall statuette made of dark, showing the hollowman in all his misshapen glory. Even the traffic light and the cinderblock foot were rendered in miniature detail. It turned to face Gianna, and waved its arms at her threateningly. She sneered at it.

Larry sat up, raising his hand and all but quivering. I sighed. “Yes, Larry?”

“The hollowman’s been hunting everyone with one of those rings. The way it behaves… I think those rings are still functioning. I think they’re hindering it somehow, and it wants everyone using them dead! But Carl is using the rings, too, right?”

“Looks that way,” Irish agreed.

“It killed Benny at the junkyard, didn’t it? Same time it got Devin Brant?”

“Benny was the one pinned to the wall, yeah. But he was already awake again when I found him. Changing.”

“Then the outlander might not know about him! It already killed him once, and it might not occur to it that it’d need to do it again!”

“Shut up, you fucking toothpick! I don’t give half a fart about this hollowman, or outlander, or whatever you want to call the ugly thing!” Gianna brought her hand down and the shadowy construct on the table, which had been thrusting its pelvis at her suggestively, was reduced to wisps of dark vapor. “It’s Carl Meiter that has my Benito! That’s the issue here!”

“Okay. Well, as I understand it Carl’s not dead. His body is…” Larry pointed at the table, where the construct had been. “is hosting the thingy. It’s his mind that’s got Benny’s body, right?”

“Yes,” I said, as Irish shook his head and said “No.”

“What?” Larry and I said, looking at Irish open-mouthed.

“Oh, come on!” I demanded. “This theory covers everything! Even the hyper-smart ‘alien’ is down with this plan! What’s your problem?”

“When you called out to him at the bar, he answered you. His mind was still in his body. Trapped there with the outlander.”

“Huh.” He was right.

“Then who or what is controlling my Benito?” demanded Gianna, eyes narrowed. She was grinding her teeth and the arms of her chair groaned as she gripped them with white knuckles.

“It has to be Carl. He knew me, even responded to his name.” I frowned harder. “But how is he in two places at once? And why was body-hopping Carl so surprised when the hollowman responded?”

“Does it matter?” Larry chewed on the arm of his sunglasses, studying me.

“Might.”

“Okay, square one, then.” He straightened up, sliding his glasses back on and locking his hands behind his back. “We’re sure that’s Carl, doing the body hopping?”

“Seems to be.” Irish looked to me for confirmation, and I nodded.

“And he can use magic? Like, the flashy stuff, not just his feng shui slo-mo stuff?”

“Not very well,” I snorted. “He’s not used to having that kind of power to draw on. That’s why you get all the light show when he does something – it’s leakage. It has to be new to him, or he’d be better at controlling it.”

“He does other things, too. He healed Alice, and the geists were his,” Irish said.

I glanced at Irish. “True. I assumed he baited those in with raw magic.”

“What’s a geist?” Larry turned to me, eyebrows up.

“An evil spirit,” Irish answered promptly.

“That’s adorable, how you keep doing that.” I shook my head, flicking ash at the ashtray. “It’s not an evil spirit. It’s just an echo. If someone dies in a nasty way, and there’s enough ambient magical power around, their death makes a kind of imprint on the power. You get this little bubble of hate and angst floating around stirring up trouble. Hell, sometimes you don’t even have to die. Sometimes just the anger and angst is enough to make one. Talented teens will do it by accident. Happens a lot more often that way these days, what with there being more magic than in the old days.”

Larry stared at me, frowning. “It’s a personality imprint on magic.”

“Did I stutter?”

“So how’s that different from your body-hopping buddy?” He swung his chair around and straddled it, grinning at me again.

“It’s –”

“Not.” Irish finished for me. “Dear Lord, it’s not any different.”

I sat there with my mouth hanging open, and finally shut it with a snap. “Can’t be. Geists are bitty. They can’t do this kind of stuff.”

“Can they do it with a metric shit-ton of power backing them up? Because that’s what you’re describing.” Larry braced his hands on his knees and grinned at me.

“Not that all this isn’t terribly fascinating, because it isn’t, but I fail to see how any of this is my problem.” Gianna set her glass down on the table with a crystalline plink, straightening on her chair. “We get the ring off Benny and I get my boy back, right?”

“Quiet, Gianna.” I waved a hand at her as my mind raced through the implications of Larry’s rather impressive deduction. I was starting to see why Irish kept the little nutjob around. “We’re working here.”

“This is my home, you festering little cooze, and I won’t be dismissed in it.” Gianna stood, teeth bared in a grating snarl.

“Sure.” The shadows stilled in the room, coagulating along the walls, dripping and running like oil as they reached the floor in dull black pools and oozed across the hardwood floor. A crackling sound came from the floor, and Gianna looked down in horror to see her feet frozen solid, a sheet of ice rooting her to the floor. “And at the moment, you’re assuming that you’re the scariest thing in this place. You’re not.” I sat back in the chair as oil ran at us from every direction.

A bookcase against the wall suddenly exploded, and Al’s bloody corpse flew into the room, narrowly missing Robert. “That’s right,” came a voice from a dark hallway I hadn’t noticed before. The secret passage must have had an environmental seal, or my shadow would have found it. “I am,” said Cat, as she stepped over the scrap lumber and ruined books.

Table of Contents / Chapter Thirty-Four >>

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