A Dirty Job

19 We’re OKAY, AS LONG AS THINGS DON’T GET WEIRD

When Charlie arrived home from his mother’s funeral, he was met at the door by two very large, very enthusiastic canines, who, undistracted by keeping watch over Sophie’s love hostage, were now able to visit the full measure of their affection and joy upon their returning master. It is generally agreed, and in fact stated in the bylaws of the American Kennel Club, that you have not been truly dog-humped until you have been double-dog-humped by a pair of four-hundred-pound hounds from hell (Section 5, paragraph 7: Standards of Humping and Ass-dragging). And despite having used an extra-strength antiperspirant that very morning before leaving Sedona, Charlie found that getting poked repeatedly in the armpits by two damp devil-dog dicks was leaving him feeling less than fresh.

“Sophie, call them off. Call them off.”

“The puppies are dancing with Daddy.” Sophie giggled. “Dance, Daddy!”

Mrs. Ling covered Sophie’s eyes to shield her from the abomination of her father’s unwilling journey into bestiality. “Go wash hands, Sophie. Have lunch while you daddy make nasty with shiksas.” Mrs. Ling couldn’t help but do a quick appraisal of the monetary value of the slippery red dogwoods currently pummeling her landlord’s oxford-cloth shirt like piston-driven leviathan lipsticks. The herbalist in Chinatown would pay a fortune for a powder made from the desiccated members of Alvin and Mohammed. (The men of her homeland would go to any length to enhance their virility, including grinding up endangered species and brewing them in tea, not unlike certain American presidents, who believe there is no stiffy like the one you get from bombing a few thousand foreigners.) Yet it appeared that the desiccated-dog-dick fortune would remain unclaimed. Mrs. Ling had long ago given up on collecting hellhound bits, when after trying to dispatch Alvin with a sharp and ringing blow to the cranium from her cast-iron skillet, he bit the skillet off its handle, crunched it down in a slurry of dog drool and iron filings, and then sat up and begged for seconds.

“Throw some water on them!” Charlie cried. “Down, doggies. Good doggies. Oh, yuck.”

Mrs. Ling was galvanized into action by Charlie’s distress call, and timing her move with the oscillating pyramid of man and dog meat in the doorway, dashed by Charlie, into the hallway, and down the steps.

Lily came up the stairs and skidded to a stop on the hallway carpet when she saw the hellhounds pounding away at Charlie. “Oh, Asher, you sick bastard!”

“Help,” Charlie said.

Lily pulled the fire extinguisher off the wall, dragged it to the doorway, pulled the pin, and proceeded to unload on the bouncing trio. Two minutes later Charlie was collapsed in a frosty heap on the threshold and Alvin and Mohammed were locked in Charlie’s bedroom, where they were joyfully chewing away on the expended fire extinguisher. Lily had lured them in there when they had tried to bite the CO2 stream, seeming to enjoy the freezing novelty of it over the welcome-home humping they were giving Charlie.

“You okay?” Lily said. She was wearing one of her chef coats over a red leather skirt and knee-high platform boots.

“It’s been kind of a rough week,” Charlie said.

She helped him to his feet, trying to avoid touching the damp spots on his shirt. Charlie did a controlled fall toward the couch. Lily helped him land, ending with one arm pinned awkwardly under his back.

“Thanks,” Charlie said. There was still frost in his hair and eyelashes from the fire extinguisher.

“Asher,” Lily said, trying not to look him in the eye. “I’m not comfortable with this, but I think, given the situation, that it’s time I said something.”

“Okay, Lily. You want some coffee?”

“No. Please shut up. Thank you.” She paused and took a deep breath, but did not extricate her arm from behind Charlie’s back. “You have been good to me over the years, and although I would not admit this to anyone else, I probably wouldn’t have finished school or turned out as well as I have if it hadn’t been for your influence.”

Charlie was still trying to see, blinking away ice crystals on his eyelids, thinking that maybe his eyeballs were frostbitten. “It was nothing,” he said.

“Please, please, shut up,” Lily said. Another deep breath. “You have always been decent to me, despite what I would call some of my bitchier moments, and in spite of the fact that you are some dark death dude, and probably had other things to worry about—sorry about your mom, by the way.”

“Thanks,” Charlie said.

“Well, given what I’ve heard about your night out before your mom died and whatnot, and what I’ve seen here today, I think—that it’s only right—that I do you.”

“Do me?”

“Yes,” she said, “for the greater good, even though you are a complete tool.”

Charlie squirmed away from her on the couch. He looked at her for a second, trying to figure out if she was putting him on, then, deciding that she wasn’t, he said, “That’s very sweet of you, Lily, and—”

“Nothing weird, Asher. You need to understand that I’m only doing this out of basic human decency and pity. You can just take it to the hoes on Broadway if you need to get your freak on.”

“Lily, I don’t know what—”

“And not in the butt,” Lily added.

There was a high-pitched little-girl giggle from behind the couch. “Hi, Daddy,” Sophie said, popping up behind him. “I missed you.”

Charlie swung her up over the back of the couch and gave her a big kiss. “I missed you, too, sweetie.”

Sophie pushed him away. “How come you have frosting on your hair?”

“Oh, that—Lily had to spray some frost on Alvin and Mohammed to settle them down and it got on me.”

“They missed you, too.”

“I could tell,” Charlie said. “Honey, could you go play in your room for a bit while I talk to Lily about business?”

“Where are the puppies?” Sophie asked.

“They’re having a T.O. in Daddy’s room. Can you go play and we’ll have some Cheese Newts in a little while?”

“Okay,” Sophie said, sliding to the floor. “Bye, Lily.” She waved to Lily.

“Bye, Sophie,” Lily said, looking even more pale than usual.

Sophie marched away in rhythm to her new chant, “Not in the butt—not in the butt—not in the butt.”

Charlie turned to face Lily. “Well, that ought to liven up Mrs. Magnussen’s first-grade class.”

“Sure, it’s embarrassing now,” Lily said, without missing a beat, “but someday she’ll thank me.”

Charlie tried to look at his shirt buttons as if he were deep in thought, but instead started to giggle, tried to stop, and ended up snorting a little. “Jeez, Lily, you’re like a little sister to me, I could never—”

“Oh, fine. I offer you a gift, out of the goodness of my heart, and you—”

“Coffee, Lily,” Charlie said with a sigh. “Could I just get you to make me a cup of coffee instead of doing me—and sit and talk to me while I drink it? You’re the only one who knows what’s going on with Sophie and me, and I need to try to sort things out.”

“Well, that will probably take longer than doing you,” Lily said, looking at her watch. “Let me call down to the store and tell Ray that I’ll be a while.”

“That would be great,” Charlie said.

“I was only going to do you in exchange for information about your Death Merchant thing, anyway,” Lily said, picking up the phone on the breakfast bar.

Charlie sighed again. “That’s what I need to sort out.”

“Either way,” Lily said, “I’m unbending on the butt issue.”

Charlie tried to nod gravely, but started giggling again. Lily chucked the San Francisco Yellow Pages at him.

“This soul smells like ham,” said Nemain, wrinkling her nose at a lump of meat she had impaled on one long claw.

“I want some,” said Babd. “Gimme.” She slashed at the carrion with her own talons, snagging a fist-sized hunk of flesh in the process.

The three were in a forgotten subbasement beneath Chinatown, lounging on timbers that had been burned black in the great fire of 1906. Macha, who was starting to manifest the pearl headdress she wore in her woman form, studied the skull of a small animal by the light of a candle she’d made from the fat of dead babies. (Macha was ever the artsy-craftsy one, and the other two were jealous of her skills.) “I don’t understand why the soul is in the meat, but not in a man.”

“Tastes like ham, too, I think,” Nemain said, spitting glowing red bits of soul when she talked. “Macha, do you remember ham? Do we like it?”

Babd ate her bit of meat and wiped her claws on her breast feathers. “I think ham is new,” she said, “like cell phones.”

“Ham is not new,” Macha said. “It’s smoked pork.”

“No,” said Babd, aghast.

“Yes,” said Macha.

“Not human flesh? Then how is there a soul in it?”

“Thank you,” Macha said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to say.”

“I’ve decided that we like ham,” said Nemain.

“There’s something wrong,” Macha said. “It shouldn’t be this easy.”

“Easy?” said Babd. “Easy? It’s taken hundreds—no, thousands of years to get this far. How many thousands of years, Nemain?” Babd looked to the poison sister.

“Many,” said Nemain.

“Many,” said Babd. “Many thousands of years. That’s not easy.”

“Souls coming to us, without bodies, without the soul stealers, that seems too easy.”

“I like it,” Nemain said.

They were quiet for a moment, Nemain nibbled at the glowing soul, Babd preened, and Macha studied the animal skull, turning it over in her talons.

“I think it’s a woodchuck,” Macha said.

“Can you make ham from woodchuck?” Nemain asked.

“Don’t know,” said Macha.

“I don’t remember woodchuck,” Nemain said.

Babd sighed heavily. “Things are going so well. Do you two ever think about when we are Above all the time, and Darkness rules all, about, you know, what then?”

“What do you mean, what then?” Macha asked. “We will hold dominion over all souls, and visit death as we wish until we consume all the light of humanity.”

“Yeah, I know,” Babd said, “but then what? I mean, you know, dominion and all that is nice, but will Orcus always have to be around, snorting and growling?”

Macha put down her skull and sat up on a blackened beam. “What’s this about?”

Nemain smiled, her teeth perfectly even, the canines just a little too long. “She’s pining about that skinny soul stealer with the sword.”

“New Meat?” Macha couldn’t believe her ears, which had become visible only a few days ago when the first of the gift souls had wandered into their claws, so they hadn’t been tested in a while. “You like New Meat?”

“Like is a little strong,” Babd said. “I just think he’s interesting.”

“Interesting in that you’d like to arrange his entrails in interesting patterns in the dirt?” Macha said.

“Well, no, I’m not talented that way like you.”

Macha looked at Nemain, who grinned and shrugged. “We could probably try to kill Orcus once Darkness rises,” Nemain said.

“I am a little tired of his preaching, and he’ll be impossible if the Luminatus doesn’t appear.” Macha shrugged a surrender. “Sure, why not.”

The Emperor of San Francisco was troubled. He sensed that something very wrong was going on in the City, yet he was at a loss as to what to do. He didn’t want to alarm the people unduly, but he did not want them to be unprepared for whatever danger they might face. He believed that a just and benevolent ruler would not use fear to manipulate his people, and until he had some sort of proof that there was an actual threat, it would be criminal to call for any action.

“Sometimes,” he said to Lazarus, the steadfast golden retriever, “a man must muster all of his courage to simply sit still. How much humanity has been spoiled for the confusion of movement with progress, my friend? How much?”

Still, he’d been seeing things, strange things. One late night in Chinatown he’d seen a dragon made of fog snaking through the streets. Then, early one morning, down by the Boudin Bakery at Ghirardelli Square, he saw what looked like a nude woman covered in motor oil crawl out of a storm sewer and grab a tall, half-full latte cup out of the trash, then dive right back in the sewer as a policeman on a bicycle rounded the corner. He knew that he saw these things because he was more sensitive than other people, and because he lived on the streets and could sense the slightest nuance of change there, and largely because he was completely barking-at-the-moon batshit. But none of that relieved him of the responsibility to his people, nor did it ease his mind about the disturbing nature of what he was seeing.

The squirrel in the hoop skirt was really bothering the Emperor, but he couldn’t exactly say why. He liked squirrels—often took the men to Golden Gate Park to chase them, in fact—but a squirrel walking upright and digging through the trash behind the Empanada Emporium while wearing a pink ball gown from the eighteenth century—well—it was off-putting. He was sure that Bummer, who was curled up sleeping in the oversized pocket of his coat, would agree. (Bummer, being a rat dog at heart, had a less than enlightened outlook upon coexistence with any rodent, no less one dressed for the court of Louis XVI.)

“Not to be critical,” said the Emperor, “but shoes would be a welcome complement to the ensemble, don’t you think, Lazarus?”

Lazarus, normally tolerant of all noncookie creatures great and small, growled at the squirrel, who appeared to have the feet of a chicken sticking out from under her skirt, which—you know—was weird.

With the growl, Bummer squirmed awake and emerged from the woolen bedchamber like Grendel from his lair. He immediately erupted into an apoplectic barking fit, as if to say, You guys, in case you didn’t notice, there’s a squirrel in a ball gown going through the trash over there and you’re just sitting here like a couple of concrete library lions! The message thus barked, off he went, a furry squirrel-seeking missile, bent on single-minded annihilation of all things rodent.

“Bummer,” called the Emperor. “Wait.”

Too late. The squirrel had tried to take off up the side of the brick building, but snagged her skirt on a gutter and fell back to the alley, just as Bummer was hitting full stride. Then the squirrel snatched up a small board from a broken pallet and swung it at his pursuer, who leapt just in time to miss taking a nail in one of his bug eyes.

Growling ensued.

The Emperor noticed at that point that the squirrel’s hands were reptilian in nature, the fingernails painted a pleasant pink to match her gown.

“You don’t see that every day,” the Emperor said. Lazarus barked in agreement.

The squirrel dropped the board and took off toward the street, moving nicely on her chicken feet, her skirt held up in her lizard hands. Bummer had recovered from the initial shock of a weapon-wielding squirrel (something he had encountered before only in doggie nightmares brought on by the late-night gift of chorizo pizza from a charitable Domino’s guy) and took off after the squirrel, followed closely by the Emperor and Lazarus.

“No, Bummer,” the Emperor called. “She’s not a normal squirrel.”

Lazarus, because he did not know how to say “well, duh,” stopped in his tracks and looked at the Emperor.

The squirrel rocketed out of the alley and took a quick turn down the gutter, falling now to all fours as she went.

Just as he reached the corner, the Emperor saw the trail of the tiny pink dress disappear down a storm sewer, followed closely by the intrepid Bummer. The Emperor could hear the terrier’s bark echoing out of the grate, fading as Bummer pursued his prey into the darkness.

Nick Cavuto sat down across from Rivera with a plate of buffalo stew roughly the size of a garbage-can lid. They were having lunch at Tommy’s Joynt, an old-school eatery on Van Ness that served home-style food like meat loaf, roasted turkey and stuffing, and buffalo stew every day of the year, and featured San Francisco sports teams on the TV over the bar whenever anyone was playing.

“What?” said the big cop, when he saw his partner roll his eyes. “Fucking what?”

“Buffalo almost went extinct once,” Rivera said. “You have ancestors on the Great Plains?”

“Special law enforcement portions—protecting and serving and stuff requires protein.”

“A whole bison?”

“Do I criticize your hobbies?”

Rivera looked at his half a turkey sandwich and cup of bean soup, then at Cavuto’s stew, then at his runt of a sandwich, then at his partner’s colossus of a stew. “My lunch is embarrassed,” he said.

“Serves you right. Revenge for the Italian suits. I love going to every call with people thinking I’m the victim.”

“You could buy a steamer, or I could have my guy find you some nice clothes.”

“Your guy the serial-killing thrift-store owner? No thanks.”

“He’s not a serial killer. He’s got some weird shit going on, but he’s not a killer.”

“Just what we need, more weird shit. What was he really doing when you had that shots-fired report?”

“Just like it said, I was going by and a guy tried to rob him at gunpoint. I drew my weapon and told the perp to halt, he drew down on me, and I fired.”

“Your ass. You never fired eleven shots in your life you didn’t hit the ten X ring with nine of them. The fuck happened?”

Rivera looked down the long table, made sure the three guys sitting down at the other end were engaged in the game showing on the TV over the bar. “I hit her with every shot.”

“Her? Perp was a woman?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Cavuto dropped his spoon. “Partner? Don’t tell me you shot the redhead? I thought that was over.”

“No. This was a new thing—like—Nick, you know me, I’m not going to fire unless it’s justified.”

“Just say what happened. I got your back.”

“It was like this bird woman or something. All black. I mean fucking black as tar. Had claws that looked like—I don’t know, like three-inch-long silver ice picks or something. My shots took chunks out of her—feathers and black goo and shit everywhere. She took nine in the torso and flew away.”

“Flew?”

Rivera sipped his coffee, eyeing his partner’s reaction over the edge of the cup. They had been through some extraordinary things working together, but if the situation had been reversed, he wasn’t sure he’d believe this story either. “Yeah, flew.”

Cavuto nodded. “Okay, I can see why you wouldn’t put that in the report.”

“Yeah.”

“So this bird woman,” Cavuto said, like that was settled, he totally believed it, now what? “She was robbing the Asher guy from the thrift shop?”

“Giving him a hand job.”

Cavuto nodded, picked up his spoon, and took a huge bite of stew and rice, still nodding as he chewed. He looked as if he were going to say something, then quickly took another bite, as if to stop himself. He appeared to be distracted by the game on television, and finished his lunch without another word.

Rivera ate his soup and sandwich in silence as well.

As they were leaving, Cavuto grabbed two toothpicks from the dispenser by the register and gave one to Rivera as they walked out into a beautiful San Francisco day.

“So you were following Asher?”

“I’ve been trying to keep an eye on him. Just in case.”

“And you shot her nine times for giving the guy a hand job,” Cavuto finally asked.

“I guess,” Rivera said.

“You know, Alphonse, that right there is why I don’t hang out with you socially. Your values are fucked up.”

“She wasn’t human, Nick.”

“Still. A hand job? Deadly force? I don’t know—”

“It wasn’t deadly force. I didn’t kill her.”

“Nine to the chest?”

“I saw her—it—last night. On my street. Watching me from a storm sewer.”

“Ever think to ask Asher how he happened to know the flying bulletproof bird woman in the first place?”

“Yeah, I did, but I can’t tell you what he said. It’s too weird.”

Cavuto threw his arms in the air. “Well, sweet Tidy Bowl Jesus skipping on the blue toilet water, we wouldn’t want it to get fucking weird, would we?”

They were on their second cup of coffee and Charlie had told Lily about not getting the two soul vessels, about the encounter with the sewer harpy, about the shadow coming out of the mountains in Sedona and the other version of The Great Big Book of Death, and his suspicions that there was a frightening problem with his little girl, the symptoms of which were two giant dogs and an ability to kill with the word kitty. To Charlie’s thinking, Lily was reacting to the wrong story.

“You hooked up with a demon from the Underworld and I’m not good enough for you?”

“It’s not a competition, Lily. Can we not talk about that? I knew I shouldn’t have told you. I’m worried about other stuff.”

“I want details, Asher.”

“Lily, a gentleman doesn’t share the details of his amorous encounters.”

Lily crossed her arms and assumed a pose of disgusted incredulity, an eloquent pose, because before she said it, Charlie knew what was coming: “Bullshit. That cop shot pieces off her, but you’re worried about protecting her honor?”

Charlie smiled wistfully. “You know, we shared a moment—”

“Oh my God, you complete man-whore!”

“Lily, you can’t possibly be hurt by my—by my response to your generous—and let me say right here—extraordinarily tempting offer. Gee whiz.”

“It’s because I’m too perky, isn’t it? Not dark enough for you? You being Mr. Death and all.”

“Lily, the shadow in Sedona was coming for me. When I left town, it went away. The sewer harpy came for me. The other Death Merchant said that I was different. They never had deaths happen as a result of their presence like I have.”

“Did you just say ‘gee whiz’ to me? What am I, nine? I am a woman—”

“I think I might be the Luminatus, Lily.”

Lily shut up.

She raised her eyebrows. As if “no.”

Charlie nodded. As if “yes.”

“The Big Death?”

“With a capital D,” Charlie said.

“Well, you’re totally not qualified for that,” Lily said.

“Thanks, I feel better now.”

Being two hundred feet under the sea always made Minty uneasy, especially if he’d been drinking sake and listening to jazz all night, which he had. He was in the last car on the last train out of Oakland, and he had the car to himself, like his own private submarine, cruising under the Bay with the echo of a tenor sax in his ear like sonar, and a half-dozen sake-sodden spicy tuna rolls sitting in his stomach like depth charges.

He’d spent his evening at Sato’s on the Embarcadero, Japanese restaurant and jazz club. Sushi and jazz, strange bedfellows, shacked up by opportunity and oppression. It began in the Fillmore district, which had been a Japanese neighborhood before World War II. When the Japanese were shipped off to internment camps, and their homes and belongings sold off, the blacks, who came to the city to work in the shipyards building battleships and destroyers, moved into the vacant buildings. Jazz came close behind.

For years, the Fillmore was the center of the San Francisco jazz scene, and Bop City on Post Street the premier jazz club. When the war ended and the Japanese returned, many a late night might find Japanese kids standing under the windows of Bop City, listening to the likes of Billie Holiday, Oscar Peterson, or Charles Mingus, listening to art happen and dissipate into the San Francisco nights. Sato was one of those kids.

It wasn’t just historical happenstance—Sato had explained to Minty, late one night after the music had ended and the sake was making him wax eloquent—it was philosophical alignment: jazz was a Zen art, dig? Controlled spontaneity. Like sumi-e ink painting, like haiku, like archery, like kendo fencing—jazz wasn’t something you planned, it was something you did. You practiced, you played your scales, you learned your chops, then you brought all your knowledge, your conditioning, to the moment. “And in jazz, every moment is a crisis,” Sato quoted Wynton Marsalis, “and you bring all your skill to bear on that crisis.” Like the swordsman, the archer, the poet, and the painter—it’s all right there—no future, no past, just that moment and how you deal with it. Art happens.

And Minty, taken by the need to escape his life as Death, had taken the train to Oakland to find a moment he could hide in, without the regret of the past or the anxiety of the future, just a pure right now resting in the bell of a tenor sax. But the sake, too much future looming ahead, and too much water overhead had brought on the blues, the moment melted, and Minty was uneasy. Things were going badly. He’d been unable to retrieve his last two soul vessels—a first in his career—and he was starting to see, or hear, the effects. Voices out of the storm sewers—louder and more numerous than ever—taunting him. Things moving in the shadows, on the periphery of his vision, shuffling, scuffling dark things that disappeared when you looked right at them.

He’d even sold three discs off the soul-vessels rack to the same person, another first. He hadn’t noticed it was the same woman right away, but when things started to go wrong, the faces played back and he realized. She’d been a monk the first time, a Buddhist monk of some kind, wearing gold-and-maroon robes, her hair very short, as if her head had been shaved and was growing out. What he remembered was that her eyes were a crystal blue, unusual in someone with such dark hair and skin. And there was a smile deep in those eyes that made him feel as if a soul had found its rightful place, a good home at a higher level. The next time he’d seen her was six months later and she was in jeans and leather jacket, her hair sort of out of control. She’d taken a CD from the “One Per Customer” rack, a Sarah McLachlan, which is what he’d have chosen for her if asked, and he barely noticed the crystal-blue eyes other than to think that he’d seen that smile before. Then, last week, it was her again, with hair down around her shoulders, wearing a long skirt and a belted muslin poet’s shirt—like an escapee from a Renaissance fair, not unusual for the Haight, but not quite common in the Castro—still, he thought nothing of it, until she had paid him and glanced over the top of her sunglasses to count the cash out of her wallet. The blue eyes again, electric and not quite smiling this time. He didn’t know what to do. He had no proof she was the monk, the chick in the leather jacket, but he knew it was her. He brought all his skills to bear on the situation, and essentially, he folded.

“So you like Mozart?” he asked her.

“It’s for a friend” was all she said.

He rationalized not confronting her by that simple statement. A soul vessel was supposed to find its rightful owner, right? It didn’t say he had to sell it directly to them. That had been a week ago, and since then the voices, the scuffling noises in the shadows, the general creepiness, had been nearly constant. Minty Fresh had spent most of his adult life alone, but never before had he felt the loneliness so profoundly. A dozen times in the last few weeks he’d been tempted to call one of the other Death Merchants under the pretense of warning them about his screwup, but mainly just to talk to someone who had a clue about what his life was like.

He stretched his long legs out over three train seats and into the aisle, then closed his eyes and laid his head back against the window, feeling the rhythm of the rattling train coming through the cool glass against his shaved scalp. Oh no, that wasn’t going to work. Too much sake and something akin to bed spins. He jerked his head forward and opened his eyes, then noticed through the doors that the train had gone dark two cars up. He sat upright and watched as the lights went out in the next car—no, that’s not what happened. Darkness moved through the car like a flowing gas, taking the energy out of the lights as it went.

“Oh, shit,” Minty said to the empty car.

He couldn’t even stand up inside the train, but stand up he did, staying slumped a little, his head against the ceiling, but facing the flowing darkness.

The door at the end of the car opened and someone stepped through. A woman. Well, not exactly a woman. What looked like the shadow of a woman.

“Hey, lover,” it said. A low voice, smoky.

He’d heard this voice before, or a voice like it.

The darkness flowed around the two floor lights at the far end of the car, leaving the woman illuminated in outline only, a gunmetal reflection against pure blackness. Since he was first tapped as a Death Merchant, Minty had never remembered feeling afraid, but he was afraid now.

“I’m not your lover,” Minty said, his voice as smooth and steady as a bass sax, not giving up a note of fear. A crisis in every moment, he thought.

“Once you’ve had black, you never go back,” she said, taking a step toward him, her blue-black outline the only thing visible in any direction now.

He knew there was a door a few feet behind him that was held shut with powerful hydraulics, and that led to a dark tunnel two hundred feet under the Bay, lined with a deadly electric rail—but for some reason, that sounded like a really friendly place to be right now.

“I’ve had black,” said Minty.

“No, you haven’t, lover. You’ve had shades of brown, dark cocoa and coffee maybe, but I promise you, you’ve never had black. Because once you do, you never ever come back.”

He watched as she moved toward him—flowed toward him—and long silver claws sprouted from her fingertips, playing in the dim glow from the safety lights, dripping something that steamed when it hit the floor. There were scurrying sounds on either side of him, things moving in the darkness, low and quick.

“Okay, good point,” Minty said.

20 ATTACK OF THE CROCODILE GUY

It was a brutally hot night in the City, and everyone had their windows open. From the roof across the alley, the spy could see the little girl happily splashing away in a tub full of suds, the two giant hounds sitting just outside the tub licking shampoo from her hand and belching bubbles as she screeched with glee.

“Sophie, don’t feed the puppies soap, okay?” The shopkeeper’s voice from another room.

“Okay, Dad. I won’t. I’m not a kid, you know,” she said, pouring more strawberry-kiwi shampoo into her palm and holding it out for one of the dogs to lick. A cloud of fragrant bubbles burped out of the beast, through the bars of the window, and out into the still air over the alley.

The hounds were the problem, but if the spy had his timing right, he’d be able to take care of them and get to the child without interference.

In the past he’d been an assassin, a bodyguard, a kickboxer, and most recently a certified fiberglass-insulation installer—skills that could serve him well in his current mission. He had the face of a crocodile—sixty-eight spiked teeth and eyes that gleamed like black glass beads. His hands were the claws of a raptor, the wicked black nails encrusted with dried blood. He wore a black silk tuxedo, but no shoes—his feet were webbed like those of a waterbird, with claws for digging prey from the mud.

He rolled the large Persian rug to the edge of the roof and waited; then, just as he had planned, he heard, “Sweetie, I’m going to take the trash out, I’ll be right back.”

“Okay, Dad.”

Funny how the illusion of security can make us careless, the spy thought. No one would leave a young child alone in the bath unattended, but the company of two canine bodyguards wouldn’t make her unattended, would it?

He waited, and the shopkeeper emerged from the steel door downstairs carrying two trash bags. He seemed momentarily thrown off by the fact that the Dumpster, which was normally right outside the door, had been moved down the alley twenty feet or so, but shrugged, kicked the door wide, and while it hissed slowly shut on its pneumatic cylinder, he dashed for the Dumpster. That’s when the spy sent the rug off the roof. The rug unrolled as it fell the four stories. Unfurled, it hit the shopkeeper with a substantial thud and drove him to the ground.

In the bathroom, the huge dogs perked up. One let out a woof of caution.

The spy already had the first bolt in his crossbow. Now he let it fly—nylon line hissed out and the bolt hit the rug with a thump, penetrating the rug and probably the shopkeeper’s calf, effectively pinning him under the rug, perhaps even to the ground. The shopkeeper screamed. The great hounds dashed out of the bathroom.

The spy loaded another bolt, attached it to the free end of the nylon line attached to the first bolt, then fired it through another section of the rug below. The shopkeeper continued to shout, but with the heavy rug pinned over him, he couldn’t move. As the spy loaded his third bolt the hounds burst through the doorway into the alley.

The third bolt wasn’t attached to a line, but had a wicked titanium-spiked tip. The spy aimed at the pneumatic cylinder on the door, hit it, and the door slammed shut, locking the hounds in the alley. He’d practiced this a dozen times in his mind, and it was all going exactly as planned. The front doors to the shop and the apartment building had been Super Glued shut before he’d come up on the roof—no easy job getting that done without being seen.

His fourth shot put a bolt in the window frame over the hall window. The bars on the bathroom were too narrow, but he knew that the shopkeeper would have left the door to the apartment open. He attached a carabiner to the nylon line and slid silently down the line to the window ledge. He unclipped, then squeezed through the bars and dropped to the floor in the hallway.

He kept close to the hall walls, taking careful, exaggerated steps to keep his toenails from catching on the carpet. He could smell onions cooking in a nearby apartment and hear the child’s voice coming from the door down the hall, which he could see was open, if only a crack.

“Dad, I’m ready to get out! Dad, I’m ready to get out!”

He paused at the doorway, peeked into the apartment. He knew the child would scream when she saw him—his jagged teeth, the claws, his cold black eyes. He would see to it that her screams were short-lived, but nobody could remain calm in the face of his fearsomeness. Of course, the fearsome effect was somewhat reduced by the fact that he was only fourteen inches tall.

He pushed the door open, but as he stepped into the apartment something grabbed him from behind, yanking him off his feet, and in spite of his training and stealth skills, he screamed like a flaming wood duck.

Someone had Super Glued the key slot in the back door and Charlie had snapped his key off trying to get it open. There was some kind of arrow stuck on a string through the back of his leg and it hurt like hell—blood was filling up his shoe. He didn’t know what had happened, but he knew it wasn’t good that the hellhounds were bouncing around him whimpering.

He pounded the door with both fists. “Open the goddamn door, Ray!”

Ray opened the door. “What?”

The hellhounds knocked them both down going through the door. Charlie jumped to his feet and limped after them, up the steps. Ray followed.

“Charlie, you’re bleeding.”

“I know.”

“Wait, you’re dragging some kind of line. Let me cut it.”

“Ray, I’ve got to go—”

Before Charlie could finish his sentence, Ray had pulled a knife from his back pocket, flicked it open, and cut the nylon line. “Used to carry this on the job to cut seat belts and stuff.”

Charlie nodded and headed up the steps. Sophie was standing in the kitchen, wrapped in a mint-green bath towel, shampoo horns still protruding from her head—she looked like a small, soapy version of the Statue of Liberty. “Dad, where were you? I wanted to get out.”

“Are you okay, honey?” He knelt in front of her and smoothed down her towel.

“I needed help on the rinse. That’s your responsibility, Dad.”

“I know, honey. I’m a horrible father.”

“Okay—” Sophie said. “Hi, Ray.”

Ray was topping the steps, holding a bloody arrow on the end of a string. “Charlie, this went through your leg.”

Charlie turned and looked at his calf for the first time, then sat on the floor, sure that he was going to pass out.

“Can I have it?” Sophie said, picking up the arrow.

Ray grabbed a dish towel from the counter and pressed it on Charlie’s wound. “Hold this on it. I’ll call 911.”

“No, I’m okay,” Charlie said, pretty sure now he was going to throw up.

“What happened out there?” Ray said.

“I don’t know, I was—”

Someone in the building started screaming like they were being deep-fried. Ray’s eyes went wide.

“Help me up,” Charlie said.

They ran through the apartment and out into the hall—the screaming was coming from the stairwell.

“Can you make it?” Ray said.

“Go. Go. I’m with you.” Charlie steadied himself against Ray’s shoulder and hopped up the stairs behind him.

The harsh screaming coming from Mrs. Ling’s apartment had dwindled to pleas for help in English, peppered with swearing in Mandarin. “No! Shiksas! Help! Back! Help!”

Charlie and Ray found the diminutive Chinese matron backed against her stove by Alvin and Mohammed, swinging a cleaver at them to keep them at bay while they barked salvos of strawberry-kiwi-flavored bubbles at her.

“Help! Shiksas try to take supper,” said Mrs. Ling.

Charlie saw the stockpot steaming on the stove, a pair of duck feet sticking out of it. “Mrs. Ling, is that duck wearing trousers?”

She looked quickly, then turned and took a swipe at the hellhounds with the cleaver. “Could be,” she said.

“Down, Alvin. Down, Mohammed,” Charlie commanded, which the hellhounds ignored completely. He turned to Ray. “Ray, would you go get Sophie?”

The ex-cop, who felt himself the master of all situations chaotic, said, “Huh?”

“They won’t back off unless she tells them to. Go get her, okay.” Charlie turned to Mrs. Ling. “Sophie will call them off, Mrs. Ling. I’m sorry.”

Mrs. Ling had been considering her dinner. She tried to shove the duck feet under the broth with her cleaver, but to little effect. “Is ancient Chinese recipe. We don’t tell White Devils about it so you don’t ruin it. You hear of paper-wrap chicken? This duck in pants.”

The hellhounds growled.

“Well, I’m sure it’s delicious,” Charlie said, leaning against her fridge so he didn’t fall over.

“You bleeding, Mr. Asher.”

“Yes, I am,” Charlie said.

Ray arrived, carrying the towel-wrapped Sophie. He set her down.

“Hi, Mrs. Ling,” Sophie said, then she stepped out of her towel, went to the hellhounds, and grabbed them by their collars. “You guys didn’t rinse,” she said. Then, buck naked, her hair still in shampoo spikes, Sophie led the hellhounds out of Mrs. Ling’s apartment.

“Uh, someone shot you, boss,” Ray said.

“Yes, they did,” said Charlie.

“You should get medical attention.”

“Yes, I should,” Charlie said. His eyes rolled back in his head and he slid down the front of Mrs. Ling’s refrigerator.

Charlie spent the entire night in the emergency room of St. Francis Memorial waiting for treatment. Ray Macy stayed with him the whole time. While Charlie enjoyed the screaming and whimpering from the other patients waiting for treatment, the retching and pervasive barf smell began to wear on him after a while. When he started to turn green, Ray tried to use his ex-cop status to gain favor with the head ER nurse, whom he had known in that old life.

“He’s hurt bad. Can’t you sneak him in somewhere? He’s a good guy, Betsy.”

Nurse Betsy grinned (which was the expression she used in lieu of telling people to fuck off) and scanned the waiting room to make sure that no one seemed particularly attentive. “Can you get him to the window?”

“Sure,” Ray said. He helped Charlie out of his chair and got him to the little bulletproof window. “This is Charlie Asher,” Ray said. “My friend.”

Charlie looked at Ray.

“I mean my boss,” Ray added quickly.

“Mr. Asher, are you going to die on me?”

“Hope not,” Charlie said. “But you might want to ask someone with more medical experience than me.”

Nurse Betsy grinned.

“He’s been shot,” Ray said, ever the advocate.

“I didn’t see who shot me,” Charlie said. “It’s a mystery.”

Nurse Betsy leaned into the window. “You know we have to report all gunshot wounds to the authorities. Are you sure you don’t want to take a veterinarian hostage and have him sew you up?”

“I don’t think my insurance will cover that,” Charlie said.

“Besides, it wasn’t a gunshot,” Ray added. “It was an arrow.”

Nurse Betsy nodded. “Let me see?”

Charlie started to roll up his pant leg and lift his leg up on the little counter. Nurse Betsy reached through the little window and knocked his foot off the shelf. “For Christ’s sakes, don’t let the others see I’m looking.”

“Ouch, sorry.”

“Is it still bleeding?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Hurt?”

“Like a bitch.”

“Big bitch or little bitch?”

“Extra large,” Charlie said.

“You allergic to any painkillers?”

“Nope.”

“Antibiotics?”

“Nope.”

Nurse Betsy reached into her uniform pocket and pulled out a handful of pills, picked out two round ones and one long one, and slid them through the little window. “By the power invested in me by Saint Francis of Assisi, I now pronounce you painless. The round ones are Percocet, the oval one is Cipro. I’ll put it on your chart.” She looked at Ray. “Fill out his papers for him, he’s going to be too fucked up to do it in a few minutes.”

“Thanks, Betsy.”

“You get any Prada or Gucci bags in that store where you work—they’re mine.”

“No problem,” Ray said. “Charlie owns the store.”

“Really?”

Charlie nodded.

“Free,” Betsy added. She slid another round pill across the counter. “For you, Ray.”

“I’m not hurt.”

“It’s a long wait. Anything could happen.” She grinned in lieu of telling him to fuck off.

An hour later the paperwork was done and Charlie was heaped in a fiberglass chair in a posture that seemed possible only if his bones had turned to marshmallow.

“They killed Rachel here,” Charlie said.

“Yeah, I know,” Ray said. “I’m sorry.”

“I still miss her.”

“Yeah, I know,” Ray said. “How’s your leg?”

“But they gave me Sophie,” Charlie said, ignoring the question. “So, you know, that was good.”

“Yeah, I know,” Ray said. “How are you feeling now?”

“I’m a little concerned that growing up without a mother, Sophie won’t be sensitive enough.”

“You’re doing a great job with her. I meant how are you feeling physically?”

“Like that thing where she kills people, just by looking at them. That can’t be good for a little girl. My fault, all my fault.”

“Charlie, does your leg hurt?” Ray had opted not to take the painkiller Nurse Betsy had given him, and now he was regretting it.

“And the thing with the hellhounds—what kid has to deal with that? That can’t be healthy.”

“Charlie, how do you feel?”

“I’m a little sleepy,” Charlie said.

“Well, you lost a lot of blood.”

“I’m relaxed, though. You know, blood loss relaxes you. You suppose that’s why they did leeches in the Middle Ages? They could use them instead of tranquilizers. ‘Yes, Bob, I’ll be right in to the meeting, but let me stick a leech on, I’m feeling a little anxious.’ Like that.”

“Great idea, Charlie. You want some water?”

“You’re a good guy, Ray. Did I ever tell you that? Even if you are serial-killing desperate Filipinas on your vacation.”

“What?”

Nurse Betsy came to the window. “Asher!” she called.

Ray looked pleadingly at her through the window—a few seconds later she was coming through the door with a wheelchair.

“How’s Painless doing?” she said.

“Oh my God, he’s incredibly irritating,” Ray said.

“You didn’t take your medicine, did you?”

“I don’t like drugs.”

“Who’s the nurse here, Ray? It’s the circle of meds, not just the patient, but everyone around him. Haven’t you seen The Lion King?”

“That’s not in The Lion King. That’s the circle of life.”

“Really? I’ve been singing that song wrong the whole time? Wow, I guess I don’t like that movie after all. Help me get Painless into the chair. We’ll have him home by breakfast.”

“We got here at dinnertime,” Ray said.

“See how you are when you’re off your meds?”

Charlie had a foam walking cast and crutches when he got home from the hospital. The painkillers had worn off to a level where he was no longer painless. His head was throbbing like tiny twin aliens were going to burst out of his temples. Mrs. Korjev came out of his apartment and cornered him in the hallway.

“Charlie Asher, I am having bone to pick with you. Last night am I seeing my little Sophie run by my apartment naked and soapy like bear, pulling giant black dogs around singing ‘not in butt’? In old country we have word for that, Charlie Asher. Word is nasty. I still have number for child service from days when my boys were boys.”

“Soapy like bear?”

“Don’t change subject. Is nasty.”

“Yes, it is. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. I was shot and wasn’t thinking straight.”

“You are shot?”

“In the leg. It’s only a flesh wound.” Charlie had waited his entire life to say those words and he felt very macho at that moment. “I don’t know who shot me. It’s a mystery. They dropped a rug on me, too.” The rug diminished the machismo somewhat. He vowed not to mention it henceforth.

“You come in. Have breakfast. Sophie will not eat toast Vladlena make. She say is raw and have toast germs.”

“That’s my girl,” Charlie said.

Charlie was no sooner in the door and on his way to rescue his daughter from toast-borne pathogens, when Mohammed grabbed the tip of one of his crutches in his mouth and dragged a hopping Charlie into the bedroom.

“Hi, Daddy,” Sophie said as her father went hopping by. “No skipping in the house,” she added.

Mohammed head-butted the hapless Beta Male to his date book. There were two names there under today’s date, which wasn’t that unusual. What was unusual was that they were the names that had appeared before: Esther Johnson and Irena Posokovanovich—the two soul vessels he’d missed.

He sat down on the bed and tried to rub the pain aliens back into his temples. How to even start? Would these names keep coming back until he got the soul vessels? That hadn’t happened with the fuck puppet. What was different here? Things were obviously getting worse—now they were shooting at him.

Charlie picked up the phone and dialed Ray Macy’s number.

It took Ray four days to come back to Charlie with the report. He had the information in three, but he’d wanted to be absolutely sure that all the painkillers had worn off and Charlie wasn’t going to be crazy anymore—going on all night about being the big death, “with a capital D.” Ray also felt a little guilty because he’d been holding out on Charlie about breaking some rules in the store.

They met in the back room on a Wednesday morning, before the store opened. Charlie had made coffee and taken a seat at the desk so he could prop his foot up. Ray sat on some boxes of books.

“Okay, shoot,” Charlie said.

“Well, first, I found three more crossbow bolts. Two had barbed-steel tips like the one that went through your leg, and one had a titanium spike. That one was stuck in the pneumatic closer on the back door.”

“Don’t care, Ray. What about the two women?”

“Charlie, someone shot you with a deadly weapon. You don’t care?”

“Correct. Don’t care. It’s a mystery. Know what I like about mysteries? They’re mysterious.”

Ray was wearing a Giants cap and he flipped it around backwards for emphasis. If he’d been wearing glasses he would have whipped those off, but he wasn’t, so he squinted like he had. “I’m sorry, Charlie, but someone wanted you and the dogs out of the house at the same time. They threw that rug on you from the rooftop across the alley, then, when you were pinned down and the dogs were outside, they shot the closer on the door so it would slam shut. They sabotaged the back door’s lock and glued the front doors shut, probably before they even started with the rug, then they slid down a line to the hall window, slipped between the bars, and—well, then it’s unclear.”

Charlie sighed. “You’re not going to tell me about the two women until you finish this, are you?”

“It was highly organized. This wasn’t a random assault.”

“The hall window upstairs has bars on it, Ray. No one can get in. No one got in.”

“Well, that’s where it gets a little crazy. You see, I don’t think it was a human intruder.”

“You don’t?” Charlie actually seemed to be paying attention now.

“In order to get through those bars, an intruder would have to be under two feet tall, and less than, say, thirty pounds. I’m thinking a monkey.”

Charlie put down his coffee so hard that a java geyser jumped out of the cup onto some papers on the desk. “You think that I was shot by a highly organized monkey?”

“Don’t be that way—”

“Who then slid down a wire, broke into the building, and did what? Made off with fruit?”

“You should have heard some of the stupid shit you were saying the other night at the hospital, and did I make fun of you?”

“I was on drugs, Ray.”

“Well, there’s no other explanation.” To Ray’s Beta Male imagination, the monkey explanation seemed completely reasonable—except for lack of motive. But you know monkeys, they’ll fling poo at you just for the hell of it, so who’s to say—

“The explanation is that it’s a mystery,” Charlie said. “I appreciate your trying to bring this…this furry bastard to justice, Ray, but I need to know about the two women.”

Ray nodded, defeated. He should have just shut up until he’d figured out why someone would want to get a monkey into Charlie’s apartment. “People can train monkeys, you know. Do you have any valuable jewelry in your apartment?”

“You know,” Charlie said, scratching his chin and looking at the ceiling as if remembering. “There was a small car parked across from the shop all day on Vallejo. And when I looked the next day, there was a pile of banana peels, like someone had been staking the place out. Someone who ate bananas.”

“What kind of car was it?” Ray said, his notepad ready.

“I’m not sure, but it was red, and definitely monkey size.”

Ray looked up from his notes. “Really?”

Charlie paused, as if thinking carefully about his answer. “Yes,” he said, very sincerely. “Monkey size.”

Ray flipped his notebook back to the pages in the front. “There is no need to be that way, Charlie. I’m just trying to help.”

“It might have been bigger,” Charlie said, remembering. “Like a monkey SUV—like what you might drive if you were transporting—I don’t know—a barrel of monkeys.”

Ray cringed, then read from the pages. “I went to the Johnson woman’s house. No one is living there, but the house isn’t on the market. I didn’t see the niece you talked about. Funny thing is, the neighbors knew she’d been sick, but no one had heard that she’d died. In fact, one guy said he thought he saw her getting into a U-Haul truck with a couple of movers last week.”

“Last week? Her niece said that she died two weeks ago.”

“No niece.”

“What?”

“Esther Johnson doesn’t have a niece. She was an only child. Didn’t have brothers or sisters, and no nieces on her late husband’s side of the family.”

“So she’s alive?”

“Apparently.” Ray handed Charlie a photograph. “That’s her latest driver’s-license photo. This changes things. Now we’re looking for a missing person, someone who will leave a trail. But the other one—Irena—is even better.” He handed Charlie another picture.

“She’s not dead either?”

“Oh, there was a death notice in the paper three weeks ago, but here’s the giveaway—all of her bills are still being paid, by personal check. Checks she signed.” Ray sat back on his stool, smiling, feeling the sweetness of righteous indignation over the monkey theory, and a little guilt alleviation for not telling Charlie about the special transactions.

“Well?” Charlie finally asked.

“She’s at her sister’s house in the Sunset. Here’s the address.” Ray tore a page out of his notebook and handed it to Charlie.

21 COMMON COURTESY

Charlie was torn—he really wanted to take his sword-cane, but he couldn’t carry it while using the crutches. He considered duct-taping it to one of the crutches, but he thought that might attract attention.

“You want me to go with you?” Ray asked. “I mean, you okay to drive, with your leg and all?”

“I’ll be fine,” Charlie said. “Someone needs to watch the store.”

“Charlie, before you go, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask, Charlie thought.

“Why did you need me to find these two women?”

You robot-necked bastard, you had to ask. “I told you, estate stuff.” Charlie shrugged. No big deal, let it go, nothing to see here.

“Yeah, I know you told me that, and normally that would make sense, but I found out a lot about these two while looking for them—no one in either of their families has died recently.”

“Funny thing,” Charlie said, juggling his keys, the cane, his date book, and his crutches by the back door. “Both bequests were from nonrelatives. Old friends.” No wonder women don’t like you, you just won’t leave things alone.

“Uh-huh,” Ray said, unconvinced. “You know, when people run, when they go as far as faking their own death to get away, they are usually running from something. Are you that something, Charlie?”

“Ray, listen to yourself. Are you back on your serial-killer thing? I thought Rivera explained that.”

“So this is for Rivera?”

“Let’s say he’s interested,” Charlie said.

“Why didn’t you just say so?”

Charlie sighed. “Ray, I’m not supposed to talk about this stuff, you know that. Fourth Amendment and all. I came to you because you’re good, and you have contacts. I depend on you and I trust you. I think you know that you can depend on me and trust me, right? I mean, in all these years, I’ve never put your disability pension in jeopardy by being careless about our arrangement, have I?”

It was a threat, however subtle, and Charlie felt bad for doing it, but he just couldn’t let Ray continue to push on this, particularly since he was in unexplored territory himself—he didn’t even know what kind of bluff he was covering.

“So Mrs. Johnson isn’t going to end up dead if I find her for you?”

“I will not lay a hand on Mrs. Johnson or Mrs. Pojo…Mrs. Pokojo—or that other woman either. You have my word on it.” Charlie raised his hand as if swearing on a Bible and dropped one of his crutches.

“Why don’t you just use the cane?” Ray said.

“Right,” Charlie said. He leaned the crutches on the door and tried his weight on the bad leg and the cane. The doctors had, indeed, said that it was just a flesh wound, so there was no tendon damage, just muscle, but it hurt like hell to put any weight on that foot. The cane would work, he decided. “I should be back to relieve you before five.” He limped out the door.

Ray didn’t like being lied to. He’d had quite enough of that from his desperate Filipinas and was becoming sensitive about being taken for a fool. Who did Charlie Asher think he was fooling? As soon as he got the store squared away, he’d give Rivera a call and see for himself.

He went out into the store and did a little dusting, then went to Charlie’s “special” rack, where he kept the weird estate items that he made such a fuss about. You were only supposed to sell one to each customer, but Ray had sold five of them to the same woman in the last two weeks. He knew he should have said something to Charlie, but really, why? Charlie wasn’t being open with him about anything, it seemed.

Besides, the woman who bought the stuff was cute, and she’d smiled at Ray. She had nice hair, a cute figure, and really striking light blue eyes. Plus there was something about her voice—she seemed so, what? Peaceful, maybe. Like she knew that everything was going to be okay and no one needed to worry. Maybe he was projecting. And she didn’t have an Adam’s apple, which was a big plus in Ray’s book lately. He’d tried to get her name, even get a look at something in her wallet, but she’d paid in cash and had been as careful as a poker player covering her cards. If she’d driven, she’d parked too far away for him to see her get into her car from the store, so there was no license number to trace.

He resolved to ask her name if she came in today. And she was due to come in. She only came in when he was working alone. He’d seen her check through the window once when he was working with Lily, and only came into the store later when Lily was gone. He really hoped she’d come in.

He tried to calm himself down for his call to Rivera. He didn’t want to seem like a rube to a guy who was still on the job. He used his own cell phone for the call so Rivera would see it was him calling.

Charlie didn’t like leaving Sophie for this long, given what had happened a few days ago, but on the other hand, whatever might be threatening her was obviously being caused by his missing these two soul vessels. The quicker he fixed the problem, the quicker the threat would be diminished. Besides, the hellhounds were her best defense, and he’d given express instructions to Mrs. Ling that the dogs and Sophie were not to be separated for any amount of time, for any reason.

He took Presidio Boulevard through Golden Gate Park into the Sunset, reminding himself to take Sophie to the Japanese Tea Garden to feed the koi, now that her plague on pets seemed to have subsided.

The Sunset district lay just south of Golden Gate Park, bordered by the American Highway and Ocean Beach on the west, and Twin Peaks and the University of San Francisco on the east. It had once been a suburb, until the city expanded to include it, and many of its houses were modest, single-story family dwellings, built en masse in the 1940s and ’50s. They were like the mosaics of little boxes that peppered neighborhoods across the entire country in that postwar period, but in San Francisco, where so much had been built after the quake and fire of ’06, then again in the economic boom of the late twentieth century, they seemed like anachronisms from both ends of time. Charlie felt like he was driving through the Eisenhower era, at least until he passed a mother with a shaved head and tribal tattoos on her scalp pushing twins in a double stroller.

Irena Posokovanovich’s sister lived in a small, one-story frame house with a small covered porch that had jasmine vines growing up trellises on either side and springing off into the air like morning-after-sex hair. The rest of the tiny yard was meticulously groomed, from the holly hedge at the sidewalk to the red geraniums that lined the concrete path up to the house.

Charlie parked a block away and walked to the house. On the way he was nearly run over by two different joggers, one a young mother pushing a running stroller. They couldn’t see him—he was on track. Now, how to go about getting in? And then what? If he was the Luminatus, then perhaps just his presence would take care of the problem.

He checked around back and saw that there was a car in the garage, but the shades were drawn on all the windows. Finally he decided on the frontal approach and rang the doorbell.

A few seconds later a short woman in her seventies wearing a pink chenille housecoat opened the door. “Yes,” she said, looking a little suspicious as she eyed Charlie’s walking cast. She quickly flipped the lock on the screen door. “Can I help you?”

It was the woman in the picture. “Yes, ma’am, I’m looking for Irena Posokovanovich.”

“Well, she’s not here,” said Irena Posokovanovich. “You must have the wrong house.” She started to close the door.

“Wasn’t there a death notice in the paper a couple of weeks ago?” Charlie said. So far, his awesome presence as the Luminatus wasn’t having much of an effect on her.

“Well, yes, I believe there was,” said the woman, sensing an out. She opened the door a little more. “It was such a tragedy. We all loved Irena so much. She was the kindest, most generous, most loving, attractive—you know, for her age—well-read—”

“And evidently didn’t know that it’s considered common courtesy when you publish a death notice to actually die!” Charlie held out the enlarged driver’s-license picture. He considered adding aha! but thought that might be a little over-the-top.

Irena Posokovanovich slammed the door. “I don’t know who you are, but you have the wrong house,” she said through the door.

“You know who I am,” Charlie said. Actually, she probably had no idea who he was. “And I know who you are, and you are supposed to have died three weeks ago.”

“You’re mistaken. Now go away before I call the police and tell them that there’s a rapist at my door.”

Charlie gagged a little, then pushed on. “I am not a rapist, Mrs. Poso…Posokev—I’m Death, Irena. That’s who I am. And you are overdue. You need to die, this minute if possible. There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s like going to sleep, only, well—”

“I’m not ready,” Irena whined. “If I was ready I wouldn’t have left my home. I’m not ready.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I have to insist.”

“I’m sure you’re mistaken. Perhaps another Mrs. Posokovanovich.”

“No, here it is, right here in the calendar, with your address. It’s you.” Charlie held his date book turned to the page with her name on it up to the little window in the door.

“And you say that that is Death’s calendar?”

“That’s correct, ma’am. Notice the date. And this is your second notice.”

“And you are Death?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, that’s just silly.”

“I am not silly, Mrs. Posokovanovich. I am Death.”

“Aren’t you supposed to have a sickle and a long black robe?”

“No, we don’t do that anymore. Take my word for it, I am Death.” He tried to sound really ominous.

“Death is always tall in the pictures.” She was standing on tiptoe, he could tell the way she kept bouncing up by the little window to get a look at him. “You don’t seem tall enough.”

“There’s no height requirement.”

“Then could I see your business card?”

“Sure.” Charlie took out a card and held it against the glass.

“This says ‘Purveyor of Fine Vintage Clothing and Accessories.’”

“Right! Exactly!” He knew he should have had a second set of business cards printed up. “And where do you think I get those things? From the dead. You see?”

“Mr. Asher, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“No, ma’am, I’m going to have to insist that you pass away, this instant. You’re overdue.”

“Go away! You are a charlatan, and I think you need psychological help.”

“Death! You’re fucking with Death! Capital D, bitch!” Well, that was uncalled for. Charlie felt bad the second he said it. “Sorry,” he mumbled to the door.

“I’m calling the police.”

“You go ahead, Mrs. — uh—Irena. You know what they’ll tell you, that you’re dead! It was in the Chronicle. They hardly ever print stuff that’s not true.”

“Please go away. I practiced for a long time so I could live longer, it’s not fair.”

“What?”

“Go away.”

“I heard that part, I mean the part about practicing.”

“Never you mind. You just go take someone else.”

Charlie actually had no idea what he would do if she let him in. Maybe he had to touch her for his Death abilities to kick in. He remembered seeing an old Twilight Zone as a kid, where Robert Redford was Death, and this old lady wouldn’t let him in, so he pretended to be injured, and when she came to help him…ALA-KAZAM! She croaked, and he peacefully led her off to Hole in the Wall, where she helped him produce independent movies. Maybe that would work. He did have the cast and the cane going for him.

He looked up and down the street to make sure that no one could see him, then he lay down, half on the little porch, half on the concrete steps. He threw his cane against the door and made sure that it clattered loudly on the concrete, then he let out what he thought was a very convincing wail. “Ahhhhhhhhh, I’ve broken my leg.”

He heard footsteps inside and saw gray hair at the little window, bouncing a little so she could see out.

“Oh, it hurts,” Charlie wailed. “Help.”

More steps, the shade in the window to the right of the door parted and he saw an eye. He grimaced in fake pain.

“Are you all right?” said Mrs. Posokovanovich.

“I need help. My leg was hurt before, but I slipped on your steps. I think I’ve broken something. There’s blood, and a piece of bone sticking out.” He kept his leg below the level where she could see it.

“Oh my,” she said. “Give me a minute.”

“Help. Please. The pain. So—much—pain.” Charlie coughed the way cowboys do when they are dying in the dirt and things are getting all dark.

He heard the latch being thrown, and then the inner door opened. “You’re really hurt bad,” she said.

“Please,” Charlie said, holding his hand out to her. “Help me.”

She unlatched the screen. Charlie suppressed a grin. “Oh, thank you,” he gasped.

She threw open the screen door and blasted him in the face with a stream of pepper spray. “I saw that Twilight Zone, you son of a bitch!” The doors slammed. The latch was thrown.

Charlie’s face felt like it was on fire.

When he could finally see well enough to walk, as he limped back to his van, he heard a female voice say, “I’d have let you in, lover.” Then a chorus of spooky-girlish laughter erupted from the storm sewer. He backed against the van, ready to draw the sword from the cane, but then he heard what sounded like a small dog barking in the sewer.

“Where did he come from?” said one of the harpies.

“He bit me! You little fucker!”

“Get him!”

“I hate dogs. When we take over, no dogs.”

The barking faded away, followed by the voices of the sewer harpies. Charlie took a deep breath and tried to blink the pain out of his eyes. He needed to regroup, but then he was taking the old lady down, pepper spray or not.

It took him the better part of an hour to get into position, but once he was ready, he put down the cinder block, flipped open his cell phone, and dialed the number he’d gotten from information.

A woman answered. “Hello.”

“Ma’am, this is the gas company,” Charlie said in his best gas-company voice. “My grid is showing pressure loss at your address. We’re sending a truck right out, but you need to get everyone out of the house, right now.”

“Well, I’m the only one here right now, but I’m sorry, I don’t smell gas.”

“It may be building up under the house,” Charlie said, feeling proud of himself for being quick on his feet. Is there anyone else in the house?”

“No, just me and my kitty, Samantha.”

“Ma’am, please take the cat and go out by the street. Our truck will meet you there. Go right now, okay?”

“Well, all right.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” Charlie clicked off. He could feel movement inside of the house. He moved right to the edge of the porch roof and raised the concrete cinder block over his head. It’ll look like an accident, he thought, like a cinder block fell off the porch roof. He was glad that no one could see him up here. He was sweating from the climb, his armpits stained, his trousers wrinkled.

He heard the door open and got ready to throw the cinder block as soon as his target emerged from under the roof.

“Good afternoon, ma’am.” A man’s voice, out by the street.

Charlie looked down to see Inspector Rivera standing at the sidewalk, having just climbed out of an unmarked car. What the hell was he doing here?

“Are you the gas company?” said Mrs. Posokovanovich.

“No, ma’am, I’m from the San Francisco police.” He flashed his badge.

“They told me there was a gas leak,” she said.

“That’s been taken care of, ma’am. Could you step back inside and I’ll check with you in a minute, okay?”

“Well, okay, then.”

Charlie heard the doors open and close again. His arms were trembling from holding the cinder block over his head. He tried to breathe quietly, thinking that the sound of his wheezing might attract Rivera’s attention, make him visible.

“Mr. Asher, what are you doing up there?”

Charlie nearly lost his balance and went over. “You can see me?”

“Yes, sir, I certainly can. And I can also see that cinder block you’re holding over your head.”

“Oh, this old thing.”

“What were you planning on doing with that?”

“Repairs?” Charlie tried. How could Rivera see him when he was in soul-vessel-retrieval mode?

“I’m sorry, but I don’t believe you, Mr. Asher. You’re going to have to drop the cinder block.”

“I’d rather not. It was really hard getting it up here.”

“Be that as it may, I’m going to have to insist that you drop it.”

“I was planning on it, but then you showed up.”

“Please. Indulge me. Look, you’re sweating. Climb down and you can sit in my air-conditioned car with me. We’ll chat—talk about Italian suits, the Giants—I don’t know—why you were about to brain that sweet old lady with a cinder block. Air-conditioning, Mr. Asher—won’t that be nice?”

Charlie brought the cinder block down and rested it on his thigh, feeling his trousers snagging beyond repair as he did so. “That’s not much of an incentive. What am I, some primitive Amazon native? I’ve had air-conditioning before. I have air-conditioning in my own van.”

“Yes, I’ll admit it’s not exactly a weekend in Paris, but the next choice was that I shoot you off the roof, and they put you in a body bag, which is going to be sweltering on a warm day like this.”

“Oh, well, yes,” Charlie said. “That does make air-conditioning sound a lot more inviting. Thanks. I’m going to toss my brick down first, if that’s okay?”

“That would be great, Mr. Asher.”

Disillusioned with DesperateFilipinas, Ray was browsing through the selection of lonely first-grade teachers with master’s degrees in nuclear physics on UkrainianGirlsLovingYou.com when she came through the door. He heard the bell and caught her out of the corner of his eye, and forgetting that his neck vertebrae were fused, he sprained the left side of his face trying to turn to see her.

She saw him looking and smiled.

Ray smiled back, then, out of the corner of his eye, saw the monitor with the photo of the first-grade teacher holding her breasts, and sprained the right side of his face trying to turn in time to punch the power button before she passed the counter.

“Just browsing,” said the love of his life. “How are you today?”

“Hi,” Ray said. In his mental rehearsals, he started with “hi,” and it just sort of burped out of him before he realized that it put him behind a beat. “I mean, fine. Sorry. I was working.”

“I can see that.” Again the smile.

She was so understanding, forgiving—and kind, you could just tell that by her eyes. He knew in his heart that he would even sit through a hat movie for this woman. He would watch A Room with a View AND The English Patient, back-to-back, just to share a pizza with her. And she would stop him from eating his service revolver halfway through the second movie, because that’s just how she was: compassionate.

She made a show of browsing the store, but two minutes hadn’t passed before she made for Charlie’s special shelf. Even the sign said SPECIAL ITEMS—ONE PER CUSTOMER, but it didn’t say if that was a per-day policy, or one per lifetime. Charlie hadn’t really specified, now that Ray thought about it. Sure, Lily had yammered on about how important it was that they adhere to the policy, but that was Lily, she might have grown up some, but she was still disturbed.

After a short time she picked up an electric alarm clock and brought it over to the counter. This was it. This was it. Ray heard the back door open.

“Will this be everything?” he said.

“Yes,” said the future Mrs. Ray Macy. “I’ve been looking for one like this.”

“Yep, you can’t beat a Sunbeam,” Ray said. “That’s two-sixteen with tax—aw, heck, call it two even.”

“That’s very nice of you,” she said, digging into a small purse woven from colorful Guatemalan cotton thread.

“Hi, Ray,” Lily said, suddenly standing there beside him like some evil phantom who appeared out of nowhere to leech every potentially joyous moment out of his life.

“Hi, Lily,” he said.

Lily clicked some keys on the computer. Slowed down by his freshly sprained face, Ray wasn’t able to turn before she’d hit the power button on the monitor.

“What’s this?” asked Lily.

With his free hand, Ray thumped Lily in the thigh under the counter.

“Ouch! Freak!”

“I’m sure you’ll enjoy waking up with that,” Ray said, handing the alarm clock to the woman who would be his queen.

“Thank you so much,” said the lovely brunette goddess of all things Ray.

“By the way,” Ray said, pushing on, “you’ve been in a couple of times, I was wondering, you know, because I’m curious that way, uh, what’s your name?”

“Audrey.”

“Hi, Audrey. I’m Ray.”

“Nice to meet you, Ray. Gotta go. Bye.” She waved over her shoulder and headed out the door.

Ray and Lily watched her walk away.

“Nice butt,” Lily said.

“She said my name,” Ray said.

“She’s a little bit—I don’t know—unimaginary for you.”

Ray turned to the nemesis Lily. “You have to watch the store. I have to go.”

“Why?”

“I have to follow her, find out who she is.” Ray began to gather his stuff—phone, keys, baseball cap.

“Yeah, that’s healthy, Ray.”

“Tell Charlie I—don’t tell Charlie.”

“Okay. So is it okay if I switch the computer from the UGLY Web site?”

“What are you talking about?”

Lily stepped back from the screen and pointed to the letters as she read, “Ukrainian Girls Loving You—U-G-L-Y, ugly.” Lily smiled, a perky, self-satisfied smile, like that kid who won the spelling bee in third grade. Didn’t you hate that kid?

Ray couldn’t believe it. They weren’t even being subtle about it anymore. “Can’t talk,” he said. “Gotta go.” He ran out the door and headed up Mason Street after the lovely and compassionate Audrey.

Rivera had driven up to the Cliff House Restaurant overlooking Seal Rocks and forced Charlie to buy him a drink while they watched the surfers down on the beach. Rivera was not a morbid man, but he knew that if he came here enough times, eventually he’d see a surfer get hit by a white shark. In fact, he sorely hoped that it would happen, because otherwise, the world made no sense, there was no justice, and life was just a tangled ball of chaos. Thousands of seals in the water and on the rocks—the mainstay of the white shark diet—hundreds of surfers in the water, dressed like seals, well, it just needed to happen for all to be right with the world.

“I never believed you, Mr. Asher, when you said that you were Death, but since I couldn’t explain whatever that thing was in the alley with you, didn’t want to explain, in fact, I let it slide.”

“And I appreciate that,” said Charlie, showing a little discomfort at drinking a glass of wine with handcuffs on. His face was candy-apple red from having been burned by the pepper spray. “Is this normal procedure for interrogations?”

“No,” Rivera said. “Normally the City is supposed to pay, but I’ll have the judge take the drinks off your sentence.”

“Great. Thanks,” Charlie said. “And you can call me Charlie.”

“Okay, and you can call me Inspector Rivera. Now, braining the old lady with the cinder block—just exactly what were you thinking?”

“Do I need a lawyer?”

“Of course not, you’re fine, this bar is full of witnesses.” Rivera had once been a by-the-book kind of cop. That was before the demons, the giant owls, the bankruptcy, the polar bears, the vampires, the divorce, and the saber-clawed woman-thing that turned into a bird. Now, not so much.

“In that case, I was thinking that no one could see me,” Charlie said.

“Because you were invisible?”

“Not really. Just sort of not noticeable.”

“Well, I’ll give you that, but I don’t think that’s any reason to crush a grandmother’s skull.”

“You have no proof of that,” Charlie said.

“Of course I do,” Rivera said, holding up his glass to signal to the waitress that he needed another Glenfiddich on the rocks. “I saw pictures of her grandchildren, she showed me when I went in the house.”

“No, I mean you have no proof that I was going to crush her skull.”

“I see,” said Rivera, who did not see at all. “How did you know Mrs. Posokovanovich?”

“I didn’t. Her name just showed up in my date book, like I showed you.”

“Yes, you did. Yes, you did. But that doesn’t really give you a license to kill her, now does it?”

“That’s the point, she was supposed to be dead three weeks ago. There was even a death notice in the paper. I was just trying to make sure it was accurate.”

“So in lieu of having the Chronicle print a correction, you thought you’d bash in granny’s brains.”

“Well, it was that or have my daughter say ‘kitty’ at her, and I refuse to exploit my child in that way.”

“Well, I admire your taking the high ground on that one, Charlie,” Rivera said, thinking, Who do I have to shoot to get a drink around here? “But let’s just say that for one millisecond I believe you, and the old lady was supposed to die, but didn’t, and that because of it you were shot with a crossbow and that thing I shot in the alley appeared—let’s just say I believe all that, what am I supposed to do about it?”

“You need to be careful,” Charlie said. “You may be turning into one of us.”

“Pardon?”

“That’s how it happened to me. When my wife passed away, in the hospital, I saw the guy that came to collect her soul vessel, and wham, I was a Death Merchant. You saw me today, when no one else could, and you saw the sewer harpy, that night in the alley. Most of the time, I’m the only one who can see them.”

Rivera really, really wanted to turn this guy over to a psychiatrist at the hospital and never see him again, but the problem was, he had seen the woman-thing, that night and another time on his own street, and he had seen reports of weird stuff happening in the City over the last two weeks. And not just normal San Francisco weird stuff, but really weird stuff, like a flock of ravens attacking a tourist in Coit Tower, and a guy who slammed his car through a storefront in Chinatown, saying that he had swerved to miss a dragon, and people all over the Mission saying that they’d seen an iguana dressed like a musketeer going through their garbage, tiny sword and all.

“I can prove it,” Charlie said. “Just take me to the music store in the Castro.”

Rivera looked at the sad, naked ice cubes in his glass and said, “Anyone ever tell you that it’s hard to follow your train of thought, Charlie?”

“You need to talk to Minty Fresh.”

“Of course, that clears things up. I’ll have a word with Krispy Kreme while I’m there.”

“He’s also a Death Merchant. He can tell you that what I’m telling you is true and you can let me go.”

“Get up.” Rivera stood.

“I’m not finished with my wine.”

“Leave the money for the drinks and get up, please.” Rivera hooked his finger in Charlie’s handcuffs and pulled him up. “We’re going to the Castro.”

“I don’t think I can work my cane with these things on,” Charlie said.

Rivera sighed and looked down on the surfers. He thought he saw something large moving in a wave behind one surfer, but as his heart leapt at the prospect, a sea lion poked his whiskered face out of the curl and Rivera’s spirits sank again. He threw Charlie the handcuff keys.

“Meet me in the car, I have to take a leak.”

“I could escape.”

“You do that, Charlie—after you pay.”

22 RECONSIDERING A CAREER IN SECONDHAND RETAIL

Anton Dubois, the owner of Book ’em Danno in the Mission, had been a Death Merchant longer than anyone else in San Francisco. Of course he hadn’t called himself a Death Merchant at first, but when that Minty Fresh fellow who opened the record store in the Castro coined the term, he could never think of himself as anything else. He was sixty-five years old and not in the best health, having never used his body for much more than to carry his head around, which is where he lived most of the time. He had, however, in his years of reading, acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of the science and mythology of death. So, on that Tuesday evening, just after sundown, when the windows of his store went black, as if all the light had been sucked suddenly out of the universe, and the three female figures moved toward him through the store, as he sat under his little reading light at the counter in the back, like a tiny yellow island in the vast pitch of space, he was the first man in fifteen hundred years to know exactly what—who—they were.

“Morrigan,” Anton said, with no particular note of fear in his voice. He set his book down, but didn’t bother to mark the page. He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his flannel shirt, then put them back on so as not to miss any detail. Just now they were only blue-black highlights moving among the deep shadows in the store, but he could see them. They stopped when he spoke. One of them hissed—not the hiss of a cat, a long, steady tone—more like the hiss of air escaping the rubber raft that is all that lies between you and a dark sea full of sharks, the hiss of your life leaking out at the seams.

“I thought something might be happening,” Anton said, a little anxious now. “With all the signs, and the prophecy about the Luminatus, I knew something was happening, but I didn’t think it would be you—in person—so to speak. This is very exciting.”

“A devotee?” said Nemain.

“A fan,” said Babd.

“A sacrifice,” said Macha.

They moved around him, just outside his circle of light.

“I moved the soul vessels,” Anton said. “I guessed that something had happened to the others.”

“Aw, are you disappointed because you’re not the first?” said Babd.

“It will be just like the first time, pumpkin,” said Nemain. “For you, anyway.” She giggled.

Anton reached under his counter and pushed a button. Steel shutters began to roll in the front of the store over the windows and door.

“You afraid we’ll get away, turtle man,” said Macha. “Don’t you think he looks like a turtle?”

“Oh, I know the shutters won’t keep you in, that’s not what they’re for. The books say that you’re immortal, but I suspect that that’s not exactly true. Too many tales of warriors injuring you and watching you heal yourself on the battlefield.”

“We will be here ten thousand years after your death, which starts pretty soon, I might add,” said Nemain. “The souls, turtle man. Where did you put them?” She extended her claws and reached out so they caught the light from Anton’s reading lamp. Venom dripped from their tips and sizzled when it hit the floor.

“You’d be Nemain, then,” Anton said. The Morrigan smiled, he could just see her teeth in the dark.

Anton felt a strange peace fall over him. For thirty years he had, in some way or another, been preparing for this moment. What was it that the Buddhists said? Only by being prepared for your death can you ever truly live. If collecting souls and seeing people pass for thirty years didn’t prepare you, what would? Under the counter he carefully unscrewed a stainless-steel cap that concealed a red button.

“I installed those four speakers at the back of the store a few months ago. I’m sure you can see them, even if I can’t,” Anton said.

“The souls!” Macha barked. “Where?”

“Of course I didn’t know it would be you. I thought it might be those little creatures I’ve seen wandering the neighborhood. But I think you’ll enjoy the music, nonetheless.”

The Morrigan looked at each other.

Macha growled. “Who says things like ‘nonetheless’?”

“He’s babbling,” said Babd. “Let’s torture him. Take his eyes, Nemain.”

“Do you remember what a claymore looks like?” Anton asked.

“A great, two-handed broadsword,” said Nemain. “Good for the taking of heads.”

“I knew that, I knew that,” said Babd. “She’s just showing off.”

“Well, in this time, a claymore means something else,” Anton said. “You acquire the most interesting things working in the secondhand business for three decades.” He closed his eyes and pushed the button. He hoped that his soul would end up in a book, preferably his first edition of Cannery Row, which was safely stored away.

The curved claymore antipersonnel mines that he had installed in speaker cabinets at the rear of the store exploded, sending twenty-eight hundred ball bearings hurtling toward the steel shutters at just under the speed of sound, shredding Anton and everything else in their path.

Ray followed the love of his life a block up Mason Street, where she hopped on a cable car and rode it the rest of the way up the hill into Chinatown. The problem was that while it was pretty easy to figure out where a cable car was going, they only came along about every ten minutes, so Ray couldn’t wait for the next one, jump on, and shout, “Follow that antiquated but quaint public conveyance, and step on it!” And there were no cabs in sight.

It turned out that jogging up a steep city hill on a hot summer day in street clothes was somewhat different from jogging on a treadmill in an air-conditioned gym behind a row of taut fuck puppets, and by the time he got to California Street, Ray was drenched in sweat, and not only hated the city of San Francisco and everyone in it, he was pretty much ready to call it quits with Audrey and go back to the relative desperation of Ukrainian Girls Loving Him from afar.

He caught a break at the Powell Street exchange, where the cable cars pick up in Chinatown, and was actually able to jump on the car behind Audrey’s and continue the breathtaking, seven-mile-per-hour chase, ten more blocks to Market Street.

Audrey hopped off the cable car, walked directly out to the island on Market, and stepped onto one of the antique streetcars, which left before Ray even got to the island. She was like some kind of diabolical rail-transit supervixen, Ray thought. The way the trains just seemed to be there when she needed them, then gone when he got there. She was master of some sort of evil, streetcar mojo, no doubt about that. (In matters of the heart, the Beta Male imagination can turn quickly on a floundering suitor, and at that point, Ray’s was beginning to consume what little confidence he had mustered.)

It was Market Street, however, the busiest street in the City, and Ray was able to quickly grab a cab and follow Audrey all the way into the Mission district, and even kept the cab for a few blocks when she was on foot again.

Ray stayed a block away, following Audrey to a big jade-green Queen Anne Victorian building off Seventeenth Street, which had a small plaque on the column by the porch that read THREE JEWELS BUDDHIST CENTER. Ray had his breath and his composure back, and was able to watch comfortably from behind a light post across the street as Audrey climbed the steps of the center. As she got to the top step, the leaded-glass door flew open and two old ladies came rushing out, frantic, it seemed, to tell Audrey something, but entirely out of control. The old ladies looked familiar. Ray stopped breathing and dug into the back pocket of his jeans. He came up with the photocopies he’d kept of the driver’s-license photos of the women Charlie had asked him to find. It was them: Esther Johnson and Irena Posokovanovich, standing there with the future Mrs. Macy. Then, just as Ray was trying to get his head around the connection, the door of the Buddhist center opened again and out charged what looked like a river otter in a sequined minidress and go-go boots, bent on attacking Audrey’s ankles with a pair of scissors.

Charlie and Inspector Rivera stood outside Fresh Music in the Castro, trying to peer in the windows past the cardboard cutouts and giant album covers. According to the hours posted on the door, the store should have been open, but the door was locked and it was dark inside. From what Charlie could see, the store was exactly as he had seen it years ago when he’d confronted Minty Fresh, except for one, distinct difference: the shelf full of glowing soul vessels was gone.

There was a frozen-yogurt shop next door and Rivera led Charlie in and talked to the owner, a guy who looked entirely too fit to run a sweetshop, who said, “He hasn’t opened for five days. Didn’t say a word to any of us. Is he okay?”

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Rivera said.

Three minutes later Rivera had obtained Minty Fresh’s phone numbers and home address from the SFPD dispatcher, and after trying the numbers and getting voice mail, they went to Fresh’s apartment in Twin Peaks to find newspapers piled up by the door.

Rivera turned to Charlie. “Do you know of anyone else who could vouch for what you’ve been telling me?”

“You mean other Death Merchants?” Charlie asked. “I don’t know them, but I know of them. They probably won’t talk to you.”

“Used-book-store owner in the Haight and a junk dealer off lower Fourth Street, right?” Rivera said.

“No,” Charlie said. “I don’t know of anyone like that. Why did you ask?”

“Because both of them are missing,” Rivera said. There was blood all over the walls of the junk dealer’s office. There was a human ear on the floor of the bookstore in the Haight.”

Charlie backed against the wall. “That wasn’t in the paper.”

“We don’t release stuff like that. Both lived alone, no one saw anything, we don’t know that a crime was even committed. But now, with this Fresh guy missing—”

“You think that these other guys were Death Merchants?”

“I’m not saying I believe that, Charlie, it could just be a coincidence, but when Ray Macy called me today about you, that was actually the reason I came to find you. I was going to ask you if you knew them.”

“Ray ratted me out?”

“Let it go. He may have saved your life.”

Charlie thought about Sophie for the hundredth time that night, worried about not being there with her. “Can I call my daughter?”

“Sure,” Rivera said. “But then—”

“Book ’em Danno in the Mission,” Charlie said, pulling his cell phone out of his jacket pocket. “That can’t be ten minutes away. I think the owner is one of us.”

Sophie was fine, feeding Cheese Newts to the hellhounds with Mrs. Korjev. She asked Charlie if he needed any help and he teared up and had to get control of his voice before he answered.

Seven minutes later they were parked crossways in the middle of Valencia Street, watching fire trucks blasting water into the second story of the building that housed Book ’em Danno. They got out of the car and Rivera showed his badge to the police officer who had been first on the scene.

“Fire crews can’t get in,” the cop said. “There’s a heavy steel fire door in the back and those shutters must be quarter-inch steel or more.”

The security shutters were bowed outward and had thousands of small bumps all over them.

“What happened?” Rivera asked.

“We don’t know yet,” said the cop. “Neighbors reported an explosion and that’s all we know so far. No one lived upstairs. We’ve evacuated all the adjacent buildings.”

“Thanks,” Rivera said. He looked at Charlie, raised an eyebrow.

“The Fillmore,” Charlie said. “A pawnshop at Fulton and Fillmore.”

“Let’s go,” Rivera said, taking Charlie’s arm to help speed-limp him to the car.

“So I’m not a suspect anymore?” Charlie asked.

“We’ll see if you live,” Rivera said, opening the car door.

Once in the car, Charlie called his sister. “Jane, I need you to go get Sophie and the puppies and take them to your place.”

“Sure, Charlie, but we just had the carpets cleaned—Alvin and—”

“Do not separate Sophie and the hellhounds for one second, Jane, do you understand?”

“Jeez, Charlie. Sure.”

“I mean it. She may be in danger and they’ll protect her.”

“What’s going on? Do you want me to call the cops?”

“I’m with the cops, Jane. Please, go get Sophie right now.”

“I’m leaving now. How am I going to get them all into my Subaru?”

“You’ll figure it out. If you have to, tie Alvin and Mohammed to the bumper and drive slowly.”

“That’s horrible, Charlie.”

“No, it’s not. They’ll be fine.”

“No, I mean they tore my bumper off last time I did that. It cost six hundred bucks to fix.”

“Go get her. I’ll call you in an hour.” Charlie disconnected.

Well, claymores suck, I can tell you that,” said Babd. “I used to like the big sword claymore, but now…now they have to make them all splody and full of—what do you call that stuff, Nemain?”

“Shrapnel.”

“Shrapnel,” said Babd. “I was just starting to feel like my old self—”

“Shut up!” barked Macha.

“But it hurts,” said Babd.

They were flowing along a storm sewer pipe under Sixteenth Street in the Mission. They were barely two-dimensional again, and they looked like tattered black battle flags, threadbare shadows, oozing black goo as they moved up the pipe. One of Nemain’s legs had been completely severed and she had it tucked under her arm while her sisters towed her through the pipe.

“Can you fly, Nemain?” asked Babd. “You’re getting heavy.”

“Not down here, and I’m not going back up there.”

“We have to go back Above,” said Macha. “If you want to heal before a millennium passes.”

As the three death divas came to a wide junction of pipes under Market Street, they heard something splashing in the pipe ahead.

“What’s that?” said Babd. They stopped.

Something pattered by in the pipe they were approaching.

“What was that? What was that?” asked Nemain, who couldn’t see past her sisters.

“Looked like a squirrel in a ball gown,” said Babd. “But I’m weak and could be delusional.”

“And an idiot,” said Macha. “It was a gift soul. Get it! We can heal Nemain’s leg with it.”

Macha and Babd dropped their unidexter sister and surged forward toward the junction, just as the Boston terrier stepped into their path.

The Morrigan backpedaling in the pipe sounded like cats tearing lace. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” chanted Macha, what was left of her claws raking the pipe to back up.

Bummer yapped out a sharp tattoo of threat, then bolted down the pipe after the Morrigan.

“New plan, new plan, new plan,” said Babd.

“I hate dogs,” said Macha.

They snagged their sister as they passed her.

“We, the goddesses of death, who will soon command the all under darkness, are fleeing a tiny dog,” said Nemain.

“So what’s your point, hoppie?” said Macha.

Over in the Fillmore, Carrie Lang had closed her pawnshop for the night and was waiting for some jewelry she’d taken in that day to finish in the ultrasonic cleaner so she could put it in the display case. She wanted to finish and get out of there, go home and have dinner, then maybe go out for a couple of hours. She was thirty-six and single, and felt an obligation to go out, just on the off chance that she might meet a nice guy, even though she’d rather stay home and watch crime shows on TV. She prided herself on not becoming cynical. A pawnbroker, like a bail bondsman, tends to see people at their worst, and every day she fought the idea that the last decent guy had become a drummer or a crackhead.

Lately she didn’t want to go out because of the strange stuff she’d been seeing and hearing out on the street—creatures scurrying in the shadows, whispers coming from the storm drains; staying at home was looking better all the time. She’d even started bringing her five-year-old basset hound, Cheerful, to work with her. He really wasn’t a lot of protection, unless an attacker happened to be less than knee-high, but he had a loud bark, and there was a good chance that he might actually bark at a bad guy, as long he wasn’t carrying a dog biscuit. As it turned out, the creatures who were invading her shop that evening were less than knee-high.

Carrie had been a Death Merchant for nine years, and after adjusting to the initial shock about the whole phenomenon of transference of souls subsided (which only took about four years), she’d taken to it like it was just another part of the business, but she knew from The Great Big Book of Death that something was going on, and it had her spooked.

As she went to the front of the store to crank the security shutters down, she heard something move behind her in the dark, something low, back by the guitars. It brushed a low E-string as it passed and the note vibrated like a warning. Carrie stopped cranking the shutters and checked that she had her keys with her, in case she needed to run through the front door. She unsnapped the holster of her. 38 revolver, then thought, What the hell, I’m not a cop, and drew the weapon, training it on the still-sounding guitar. A cop she had dated years ago had talked her into carrying the Smith & Wesson when she was working the store, and although she’d never had to draw it before, she knew that it had been a deterrent to thieves.

“Cheerful?” she called.

She was answered by some shuffling in the back room. Why had she turned most of the lights out? The switches were in the back room, and she was moving by the case lights, which cast almost no light at the floor, where the noises were coming from.

“I have a gun, and I know how to use it,” she said, feeling stupid even as the words came out of her mouth.

This time she was answered by a muffled whimper. “Cheerful!”

She ducked under the lift gate in the counter and ran to the back room, fanning the area with her pistol the way she saw them do in cop shows. Another whimper. She could just make out Cheerful, lying in his normal spot by the back door, but there was something around his paws and muzzle. Duct tape.

She reached out to turn on the lights and something hit her in the back of the knees. She tried to twist around and something thumped her in the chest, setting her off balance. Sharp claws raked her wrists as she fell and she lost her grip on the revolver. She hit her head on the doorjamb, setting off what seemed like a strobe light in her head, then something hit her in the back of the neck, hard, and everything went black.

It was still dark when she came to. She couldn’t tell how long she’d been out, and she couldn’t move to look at her watch. Oh my God, they’ve broken my neck, she thought. She saw objects moving past her, each glowing dull red, barely illuminating whatever was carrying them—tiny skeletal faces—fangs, and claws and dead, empty eye sockets. The soul vessels appeared to be floating across the floor, with a carrion puppet escort. Then she felt claws, the creatures, touching her, moving under her. She tried to scream, but her mouth had been taped shut.

She felt herself being lifted, then made out the shape of the back door of her shop opening as she was carried through it, only a foot or so off the floor. Then she was hoisted nearly upright, and she felt herself falling into a dark abyss.

They found the back door to the pawnshop open and the basset hound taped up in the corner. Rivera checked the shop with his weapon drawn and a flashlight in one hand, then called Charlie in from the alley when he found no one there.

Charlie turned on the shop lights as he came in. “Uh-oh,” he said.

“What?” Rivera said.

Charlie pointed to a display case with the glass broken out. “This case is where she displayed her soul vessels. It was nearly full when I was in here—now, well…”

Rivera looked at the empty case. “Don’t touch anything. Whatever happened here, I don’t think it was the same perp who hit the other shopkeepers.”

“Why?” Charlie looked back to the back room, to the bound basset hound.

“Because of him,” Rivera said. “You don’t tie up the dog if you’re going to slaughter the people and leave blood and body parts everywhere. That’s not the same kind of mentality.”

“Maybe she was tying him up when they surprised her,” Charlie said. “She kind of had the look of a lady cop.”

“Yeah, and all cops are into dog bondage, is that what you’re saying?” Rivera holstered his weapon, pulled a penknife from his pocket, and went to where the basset hound was squirming on the floor.

“No, I’m not. Sorry. She did have a gun, though.”

“She must have been here,” Rivera said. “Otherwise the alarms would have been set. What’s that on that doorjamb?” He was sawing through the duct tape on the basset’s paws, being careful not to cut him. He nodded toward the doorway from the shop to the back room.

“Blood,” Charlie said. “And a little hair.”

Rivera nodded. “That blood on the floor there, too? Don’t touch.”

Charlie looked at a three-inch puddle to the left of the door. “Yep, I think so.”

Rivera had the basset’s paws free and was kneeling on him to hold him still while he took the tape off his muzzle. “Those tracks in it, don’t smear them. What are they, partial shoe prints?”

“Look like bird-feet prints. Chickens maybe?”

“No.” Rivera released the basset, who immediately tried to jump on the inspector’s Italian dress slacks and lick his face in celebration. He held the basset hound by the collar and moved to where Charlie was examining the tracks.

“They do look like chicken tracks,” he said.

“Yep,” Charlie said. “And you have dog drool on your jacket.”

“I need to call this in, Charlie.”

“So dog drool is the determining factor in calling in backup?”

“Forget the dog drool. The dog drool is not relevant. I need to report this and I need to call my partner in. He’ll be pissed that I’ve waited this long. I need to take you home.”

“If you can’t get the stain out of that thousand-dollar suit jacket, you’ll think it’s relevant.”

“Focus, Charlie. As soon as I can get another unit here, I’m sending you home. You have my cell. Let me know if anything happens. Anything.”

Rivera called the dispatcher on his cell phone and asked him to send a uniform unit and the crime-scene squad as soon as they were available. When he snapped the phone shut, Charlie said, “So I’m not under arrest anymore?”

“No. Stay in touch. And stay safe, okay? You might even want to spend a few nights outside of the City.”

“I can’t. I’m the Luminatus, I have responsibilities.”

“But you don’t know what they are—”

“Just because I don’t know what they are doesn’t mean I don’t have them,” Charlie said, perhaps a little too defensively.

“And you’re sure you don’t know how many of these Death Merchants are in the City, or where they might be?”

“Minty Fresh said there was at least a dozen, that’s all I know. This woman and the guy in the Mission were the only ones I spotted on my walks.”

They heard a car pull up in the alley and Rivera went to the back door and signaled to the officers, then turned to Charlie. “You go home and get some sleep, if you can, Charlie. I’ll be in touch.”

Charlie let the uniformed police officer lead him to the cruiser and help him into the back, then waved to Rivera and the basset hound as the patrol car backed out of the alley.

23 A FUCKED-UP DAY

It was a fucked-up day in the City by the Bay. At first light, flocks of vultures perched on the superstructures of the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, and glared down at commuters as if they had a lot of goddamn gall to still be alive and driving. Traffic copters that were diverted to photograph the ranks of carrion birds ended up covering a spiral cloud of bats that circled the Transamerica pyramid for ten minutes, then seemed to evaporate into a black mist that floated out over the Bay. Three swimmers who had been competing in the San Francisco Triathlon drowned in the Bay, and a helicopter camera photographed something under the water, a dark shape approaching one of the swimmers from below and dragging him under. Numerous replays of the tape revealed that rather than the sleek shape of a shark, the creature had a wide wingspan and a distinctly horned head, unlike any ray or skate that anyone had ever seen before. The ducks in Golden Gate Park suddenly took to the wing and left the area, the hundreds of sea lions that normally lounged in the sun down at Pier 39 were gone as well, and even the pigeons seemed to have disappeared from the City.

A grunt reporter who had been covering the overnight police blotter noticed the coincidence of seven reports of violence or missing persons at local-area secondhand stores, and by early evening the television stations were mentioning it, along with spectacular footage of the Book ’em Danno building burning in the Mission. And there were hundreds of singular events experienced by individuals: creatures moving in the shadows, voices and screams from the sewer grates, milk souring, cats scratching owners, dogs howling, and a thousand people woke up to find that they no longer cared for the taste of chocolate. It was a fucked-up day.

Charlie spent the rest of the night fretting and checking locks, then double-checking them, then looking on the Internet for clues about the Underworlders, just in case someone posted a brand-new ancient document since he’d last checked. He wrote a will, and several letters, which he walked outside and put in the mailbox out on the street rather than with the outgoing mail on the counter of the store. Then, around dawn, completely exhausted yet with his Beta Male imagination racing at a thousand miles an hour, he took two of the sleeping pills Jane had given him and slept through the fucked-up day, to be awakened in early evening by a call from his darling daughter.

“Hello.”

“Aunt Cassie is an anti-Semite,” said Sophie.

“Honey, it’s six in the morning. Can we discuss Aunt Cassie’s politics a little later?”

“It is not, it’s six at night. It’s bath time, and Aunt Cassie won’t let me bring Alvin and Mohammed into the bathroom with me for my bath, because she’s an anti-Semite.”

Charlie looked at his watch. He was sort of glad that it was six in the evening and he was talking to his daughter. Whatever happened while he was sleeping at least hadn’t affected that.

“Cassie is not an anti-Semite.” It was Jane on the other line.

“Is too,” said Sophie. “Be careful, Daddy, Aunt Jane is an anti-Semite sympathizer.”

“I am not,” Jane said.

“Listen to how smart my daughter is,” said Charlie. “I didn’t know words like anti-Semite and sympathizer when I was her age, did you?”

“You can’t trust the goyim, Daddy,” said Sophie. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “They hate baths, the goyim.”

“Daddy’s a goyim, too, baby.”

“Oh my God, they’re everywhere, like pod people!” He heard his daughter drop the phone, scream, and then a door slammed.

“Sophie, you unlock this door this instant,” Cassie said in the background.

Jane said, “Charlie, where does she get this stuff? Are you teaching her this?”

“It’s Mrs. Korjev—she’s descended from Cossacks and she has a little residual guilt for what her ancestors did to the Jews.”

“Oh,” Jane said, not interested now that she couldn’t blame Charlie. “Well, you shouldn’t let the dogs in the bathroom with her. They eat the soap and sometimes they get in the tub, and then—”

“Let them go with her, Jane,” Charlie interrupted. “They may be the only thing that can protect her.”

“Okay, but I’m only letting them eat the cheap soaps. No French-milled soaps.”

“They’re fine with domestic soap, Jane. Look, I drew up a holographic will last night. If something happens to me, I want you to raise Sophie. It’s in there.”

Jane didn’t answer. He could hear her breathing on the other end.

“Jane?”

“Sure, sure. Of course. What the hell is going on with you guys? What’s the big danger Sophie’s in? Why are you being spooky like this? And why didn’t you call earlier, you fucker?”

“I was up all night doing stuff. Then I took two of those sleeping pills you gave me. Suddenly twelve hours are gone.”

“You took two? Never take two.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Charlie said. “Anyway, I’m sure I’ll be okay, but if for some reason I’m not, you need to take Sophie and get out of the City for a while. I mean like up in the Sierras. I also sent you a letter explaining everything, as much as I know, anyway. Only open it if something happens, okay?”

“Nothing better happen, you fuck. I just lost Mom, and I—why the hell are you talking like this, Charlie? What kind of trouble are you in?”

“I can’t tell you, Jane. You have to trust me that I didn’t have any choice in the matter.”

“How can I help?”

“By doing exactly what you’re doing, taking care of Sophie, keeping her safe, and keeping the hellhounds with her at all times.”

“Okay, but nothing better happen to you. Cassie and I are going to get married and I want you to give me away. And I want to borrow your tux, too. It’s Armani, right?”

“No, Jane.”

“You won’t give me away?”

“No, no, it’s not that, I’d pay her to take you, it’s not that.”

“Then you don’t think that gay people should be allowed to get married, is that it? You’re finally coming clean. I knew it, after all—”

“I just don’t think that gay people should be allowed to get married wearing my tux.”

“Oh,” Jane said.

“You’ll wear my Armani tux and I’ll have to rent some piece of crap or buy something new and cheap, and then I’ll go through eternity looking like a total dork in the wedding pictures. I know how you guys like to show wedding pictures—it’s like a disease.”

“By ‘you guys,’ you mean lesbians?” Jane said, sounding very much like a prosecuting attorney.

“Yes, I mean lesbians, dumbfuck,” said Charlie, sounding very much like a hostile witness.

“Oh, okay,” Jane said. “It is my wedding, I guess I can buy a tux.”

“That would be nice,” Charlie said.

“I’m sort of needing the pants cut a little looser in the seat these days anyway,” Jane said.

“Thatta girl.”

“So you’ll be safe and give me away.”

“I’ll sure try. You think Cassandra will let me bring the little Jewish kid?”

Jane laughed. “Call me every hour,” she said.

“I won’t do that.”

“Okay, when you can.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “Bye.” He smiled to himself and rolled out of bed, wondering if this might be the last time he would ever do that. Smile.

Charlie showered, ate a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and put on a thousand-dollar suit for which he had paid forty bucks. He limped around the bedroom for a few minutes and decided that his leg felt pretty good and he could do without the foam walking cast, so he left it on the floor by the bed. He put on a pot of coffee and called Inspector Rivera.

“It was a fucked-up day,” Rivera said. “Charlie, you need to take your daughter and get out of town.”

“I can’t do that. This is about me. You’ll keep me informed, right?”

“Promise you won’t try to do anything stupid or heroic?”

“Not in my DNA, Inspector. I’ll call you if I see anything.”

Charlie disconnected, having no idea what he was going to do, but feeling like he had to do something. He called Jane’s house to say good night to Sophie.

“I just want you to know that I love you very much, honey.”

“Me, too, Daddy. Why did you call?”

“What, you have a meeting or something?”

“We’re having ice cream.”

“That’s nice. Look, Sophie, Daddy has to go do some things, so I want you to stay with Aunt Jane for a few days, okay?”

“Okay. Do you need some help? I’m free.”

“No, honey, but thank you.”

“Okay, Daddy. Alvin is looking at my ice cream. He looks hungry, like bear. I have to go.”

“Love you, honey.”

“Love you, Daddy.”

“Apologize to Aunt Cassie for calling her an anti-Semite.”

“’Kay.” Click.

She hung up on him. The apple of his eye, the light of his life, his pride and joy, hung up on him. He sighed, but felt better. Heartbreak is the natural habitat of the Beta Male.

Charlie took a few minutes in the kitchen to sharpen the edge of the sword-cane on the back of the electric can opener he and Rachel had received as a wedding present, then he headed out to check on the store.

As soon as he opened the door to the back staircase Charlie heard strange animal noises coming from the store. It sounded as if they were coming from the back room, and there were no lights on, although he could see plenty of light filtering in from the store. Was this it? Sort of solved the problem of what he was going to do.

He drew the sword from his cane and crept down the stairs in a crouch, moving along the edge of each step to minimize squeakage. Halfway down he saw the source of the animal noises and he recoiled, leaping nearly halfway back up the staircase.

“For the love of God!”

“It needed to be done,” Lily said. She was astraddle Ray Macy, her plaid pleated skirt (mercifully) draped out over him, covering the parts that would have caused Charlie to have to tear his eyes out, which he was thinking about doing anyway.

“It did,” Ray agreed breathlessly.

Charlie peeked down into the back room—they were still at it, Lily riding Ray like he was a mechanical bull, one bare breast bouncing out of the lapel of her chef ’s coat.

“He was despondent,” she said. “I found him giving himself hickies with the shop vac. It’s for the greater good, Asher.”

“Well, stop it,” Charlie said.

“No, no, no, no, no,” said Ray.

“It’s a charity thing,” Lily said.

“You know, Lily,” Charlie said, covering his eyes, “you could exercise your charity in other ways, like Salvation Army Santa or something.”

“I don’t want to fuck those guys. Most of them are raging alcoholics, and they stink. At least Ray is clean.”

“I don’t mean do one, I mean be one. Ring the bell with the little red kettle. Jeez.”

“I am clean,” said Ray.

“You shut up,” Charlie said. “She’s young enough to be your daughter.”

“He was suicidal,” Lily said. “I may be saving his life.”

“She is,” Ray said.

“Shut up, Ray,” Charlie said. “This is pathetic, desperate pity sex, that’s all it is.”

“He knows that,” Lily said.

“I don’t mind,” said Ray.

“I’m doing this for the cause, too,” Lily said. “Ray was holding out on you.”

“I was?” said Ray.

“How?” Charlie said.

“He found a woman who was buying all the soul vessels. She was with the clients you missed. Somewhere in the Mission. He wasn’t going to tell you about her.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ray said. Then added, “Faster, please.”

“Tell him the address,” Lily said.

“Lily,” Charlie said, “this isn’t really necessary.”

“No,” Ray said.

There was a loud smack. Charlie opened his eyes. They were still there, doing it, but Ray’s right cheek was bright red and Lily was winding up to slap him again.

“Tell him!”

“It’s on Guerrero Street, between Eighteenth and Nineteenth, I don’t know the number, but it’s a big green Victorian, you can’t miss it. Three Jewels Buddhist Center.”

SMACK!

“Ouch, I told him,” Ray whined.

“That’s for not getting the address, BITCH!” Lily said. Then to Charlie: “There you go, Asher. I want a prime position when you take over the Underworld!”

Charlie thought that one of the first things he was going to change when he took over was expanding The Great Big Book of Death to include how to handle situations like this. But instead he said, “You got it, Lily. You’ll be in charge of dress code and torture.”

“Sweet,” Lily said. “’Scuse me, Asher, I have to finish this.” Then to Ray: “Hear that? No more flannel shirts for you, grommet!” SMACK!

The grunts coming from Ray increased in frequency and intensity.

“Sure,” Charlie said. “I’ll just go out the other door.”

“See ya,” Ray said.

“I’m never going to look either one of you in the eye again, okay?”

“Sounds good, Asher,” Lily said. “Be careful.”

Charlie crept back up the steps, went out the front door of his apartment and down the elevator to the street entrance, suppressing his gag reflex the whole way. On the street he flagged down a cab and rode into the Mission, trying to wipe the image of his shagging employees out of his mind.

The Morrigan had followed the gift souls that had escaped through the drains to a deserted street in the Mission. Now they waited, watching the green Victorian building from storm-drain grates at either end of the street. They were more cautious now, their rapacious nature having been dampened somewhat by having been severely blown up the night before.

They called them the gift souls because the little patchwork creatures brought the souls right to them in the sewers—the gifts showing up in the Morrigan’s weakest moment. After the accursed Boston terrier had chased them through miles of pipelines, leaving them battered and exhausted on a high ledge at a pipe junction, along marched twenty or so of the darling little nightmares, all dressed up in finery and carrying just what they needed to heal their wounds and replenish their strength: human souls. And thus renewed, they were able to scare away that obnoxious little dog. The Morrigan were back—not to the strength they’d achieved before the explosion, maybe not even enough to fly, but certainly enough to venture Above once again, especially with so many souls at hand.

No one was out on the streets tonight except the junkies, the hookers, and the homeless. After the fucked-up day in the City, most everyone had decided that it was just a better idea to stay in, safer. To the Morrigan (for all they cared), they were safer in their homes the same way a tuna fish is safer in a can, but no one knew that yet. No one knew what they were hiding from except Charlie Asher, and he was getting out of a cab right in front of them as they watched.

“It’s New Meat,” said Macha.

“We should give him a new name,” said Babd. “I mean, he’s really not that new anymore.”

“Hush,” hushed Macha.

“Hey, lover,” Babd called out of her drain. “Did you miss me?”

Charlie paid the cabbie and stood in the middle of the street looking at the big jade-green Queen Anne. There were lights on in the turret upstairs and in one window downstairs. He could just make out the sign that read THREE JEWELS BUDDHIST CENTER. He started to step toward the house and saw movement in the lattice under the porch—eyes shining. A cat maybe. His cell phone rang and he flipped it open.

“Charlie, it’s Rivera. I have some good news; we found Carrie Long, the woman from the pawnshop, and she’s still alive. She was tied up and thrown in a Dumpster a block from her store.”

“That’s great,” Charlie said. But he wasn’t feeling great. The things that had been moving under the porch were coming out. Moving up the stairs, standing on the porch, lining up and facing him. Twenty or thirty of them, a little more than a foot tall, dressed in ornate period costumes. Each had the skeletal face of a dead animal, cats, foxes, badgers—animals Charlie couldn’t identify, but just the skulls—the eye sockets empty, black. Yet they stared.

“You won’t believe what she said put her there, Charlie. Little creatures, little monsters, she said.”

“About fourteen inches tall,” Charlie said.

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“Lots of teeth and claws, like animal parts stuck together, all dressed up like they were going to a grand costume ball?”

“What are you telling me, Charlie? What do you know?”

“Just guessing,” Charlie said. He unclipped the latch on his sword-cane.

“Hey, lover,” came a female voice from behind him. “Did you miss me?”

Charlie turned. She was crawling out of the drain almost directly behind him.

“The bad news,” Rivera said, “is we found the junk dealer and the bookstore guy from Book ’em Danno—pieces of them.”

“That is bad news,” Charlie said. He started moving up the street, away from the sewer harpy and the porch full of Satan’s sock puppets.

“New Meat,” came a voice from up the street.

Charlie looked to see another sewer harpy coming out of the drain, her eyes gleaming black in the streetlight. Behind him he heard the clacking of little animal teeth.

“Charlie, I still think you should leave town for a while, but if you don’t, and don’t tell anyone I told you this, you should get a gun, maybe a couple of guns.”

“I think that would be a great idea,” Charlie said. The two sewer harpies were moving very slowly toward him, awkwardly, as if their nerves were short-circuiting. The one closest to him, the one from the alley in North Beach, was licking her lips. She looked a little ragged compared to the night she’d seduced him. He moved up the street away from them.

“A shotgun, so you won’t need to learn to shoot. I can’t give you one, but—”

“Inspector, I’m going to have to get back to you.”

“I’m serious, Charlie, whatever these things are, they are going after your kind.”

“You have no idea how clear that is to me, Inspector.”

“Is that the one who shot me?” said the closest harpy. “Tell him I’m going to suck his eyeballs out of the sockets and chew them in his ear.”

“You get that, Inspector?” Charlie said.

“She’s there?”

“They,” Charlie said.

“This way, Meat,” said the third sewer harpy, coming out of the drain at the far end of the block. She stood, extended her claws, and flicked a line of venom down the side of a parked car. The paint sizzled and ran where it hit.

“Where are you, Charlie? Where are you?”

“I’m in the Mission. Near the Mission.”

The little creatures were coming down the steps now, down the walk toward the street.

“Look,” said a harpy, “he brought presents.”

“Charlie, where exactly are you?” said Rivera.

“Gotta go, Inspector.” Charlie flipped the phone closed and dropped it in his coat pocket. Then he drew the sword from the cane and turned to the harpy from the alley. “For you,” he said to her, whipping the sword in a flourish through the air.

“That’s sweet,” she said. “You always think about my needs.”

The 1957 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham was the perfect show-off of death machines. It consisted of nearly three tons of steel stamped into a massively mawed, high-tailed beast, lined with enough chrome to build a Terminator and still have parts left over—most of it in long, sharp strips that peeled off on impact and became lethal scythes to flay away pedestrian flesh. Under the four headlights it sported two chrome bumper bullets that looked like unexploded torpedoes or triple-G-cup Madonna death boobs. It had a noncollapsible steering column that would impale the driver upon any serious impact, electric windows that could pinch off a kid’s head, no seat belts, and a 325 horsepower V8 with such appallingly bad fuel efficiency that you could hear it trying to slurp liquefied dinosaurs out of the ground when it passed. It had a top speed of a hundred and ten miles an hour, mushy, bargelike suspension that could in no way stabilize the car at that speed, and undersized power brakes that wouldn’t stop it either. The fins jutting from the back were so high and sharp that the car was a lethal threat to pedestrians even when parked, and the whole package sat on tall, whitewall tires that looked, and generally handled, like oversized powdered doughnuts. Detroit couldn’t have achieved more deadly finned ostentatia if they’d covered a killer whale in rhinestones. It was a masterpiece.

And the reason you need to know all that, is that along with the battle-worn Morrigan and the well-dressed chimeras, a ’57 Eldorado was rapidly approaching Charlie.

The bloodred lacquered Eldo slid around the corner, tires screaming like flaming peacocks, hubcaps spinning off toward the curb, engine roaring, spewing blue smoke out of the rear wheel wells like a flatulent dragon. The first of the Morrigan turned in time to take a bumper bullet in the thigh before she was dragged and folded under the car and spit out the back into a black heap. The headlights came on and the Caddy veered toward the Morrigan nearest Charlie.

The animal creatures scurried back up the sidewalk and Charlie ran up onto the hood of a parked Honda as the Eldo smacked the second Morrigan. She rag-doll-whipped over the hood as the car’s brakes screamed, then flew twenty yards down the street. The Caddy peeled out and hit her again, this time rolling over her with a series of thumps and leaving her tossing down the tarmac, shedding pieces as she rolled. The Caddy blazed on toward the final Morrigan.

This one had a few seconds on her sisters and started running up the street, her shape changing, arms to wings, tail feathers trying to manifest, but she didn’t seem able to make the transformation in time to fly. The Eldo plowed over her, then hit the brakes, reversed, and burned rubber on her back.

Charlie ran up on the roof of the Honda, ready to leap away from the street, but the Caddy stopped and the blacked-out electric window wound down.

“Get the fuck in the car,” said Minty Fresh.

Minty Fresh hit the final Morrigan again as he speeded off down the block, took two screeching lefts, then pulled the car to the curb, jumped out, and ran around to the front.

“Oh, goddamn,” said Minty Fresh (damn on the downbeat, with pain and sustain). “Goddamn, my hood and grille are all fucked up. Goddamn. I will tolerate the rising of darkness to cover the world, but you do not fuck with my ride.”

He jumped back in the car, threw it into gear, and screeched around the next corner.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to run over the bitches again. You do not fuck with my ride.”

“Well, what did you think would happen when you ran them over?”

“Not this. I never ran over anyone before. Don’t act like that’s a surprise.”

Charlie looked at the gleaming interior of the car, the bloodred leather seats, the dash fitted with walnut burl and gold-plated knobs.

“This is a great car. My mailman would love this car.”

“Your mailman?”

“He collects vintage pimp wear.”

“So what are you trying to say?”

“Nothing.”

They were already on Guerrero Street and Minty floored it as they approached the target block. The first Morrigan he had hit was just getting to her knees when he hit her again, knocking her over two parked cars and into the side of a vacant building. The second one turned to face them and bared her claws, which raked the hood as he rolled over her with a drumroll of thumps, then he ran over the third one’s legs as she was crawling back into the storm sewer.

“Jeez,” Charlie said, turning and looking out the back window.

Minty Fresh seemed to turn his full attention to driving safely now. “What the hell are those things?”

“I call them sewer harpies. They’re the things that call to us from the storm sewers. They’re a lot stronger now than they used to be.”

“They’re scary is what they are,” said Minty.

“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “Have you gotten a good look at them? I mean, they got the badonkadonk out back and some fine bajoopbadangs up front, know what I’m sayin’, dog? Buss a rock wid a playa?” He offered his fist for Minty to buss him a rock, but alas, the mint one left him hangin’.

“Stop that,” Fresh said.

“Sorry,” Charlie said.

“Talk Like a Playa in Ten Days or Less—Stone Thug Edition?” Minty asked.

Charlie nodded. “We got the CD into the store a couple of months ago. I practice in the van. How am I doing?”

“Your Negro-osity is uncanny. I had to keep checking to make sure you’re still white.”

“Thanks,” Charlie said, then, as if a light went on: “Hey, I’ve been looking for you—where the hell have you been?”

“Hiding out. One of those things came after me on the BART a few nights ago when I was coming back from Oakland.”

“How’d you get away?”

“Those little animal things, a bunch of them attacked her in the dark. I could hear her screaming at them, tearing them to ribbons, but they held her off until the train pulled into the station, which was full of people. She bolted back into the tunnel. There were pieces of the animal creatures everywhere in the train car.”

Minty turned onto Van Ness and started heading toward Charlie’s side of town.

“So they helped you? They’re not part of the Underworlders trying to take over?”

“They don’t appear to be. They saved my ass.”

“So you know some of the Death Merchants have been killed?”

“I didn’t know. It wasn’t in the paper. I saw where Anton’s shop burned up last night. He didn’t make it out?”

“They found pieces of him,” Charlie said.

“Charlie, I think I caused this.” Minty Fresh turned and really looked at Charlie for the first time, his golden eyes looking forlorn. “I failed to collect my last two soul vessels, and all of this started.”

“I thought it was me,” Charlie said. “I missed two as well. But I don’t think it’s us. My two clients are alive, I think they’re in that house where I was going when you saved me: the Three Jewels Buddhist Center. There’s a woman there who’s been buying up soul vessels, too.”

“Cute brunette?” Minty asked.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“She bought some from me, too. Tried to disguise herself, but it was her.”

“Well, she’s in that house back there. I’ve got to go back there.”

“I don’t want anything to do with those bitches with the claws,” Minty said.

“True dat,” Charlie said. “I had a thing with one of them.”

“No.”

“Yeah, she got all up in my grille and shit—had to cut da ho loose.”

“Stop that.”

“Sorry. Anyway, I’ve got to go back.”

“You sure? I don’t think they’re dead. Doesn’t look like they can be dead.”

“You could run over them again. By the way, how did you know where to find me?”

“After I heard about Anton’s place burning, I tried to call him and got a disconnected message, so I went to your store. I talked to that little Goth girl you have working for you. She told me where you went. Talked to her for about ten minutes. She knows about me—I mean us? The Death Merchants?”

“Yes, I told her a long time ago. Wasn’t she, uh, busy when you got there? With a guy, I mean.”

“No. She seeing anyone?”

“I thought you were gay?”

“I never said that.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t go out of your way to deny it either.”

“Charlie, I run a music store in the Castro, I’d do more business as a gay Death Merchant than a straight shopkeeper.”

“Good point. I never thought of that.”

“Color me surprised. So, she seeing anyone?”

“She’s half your age and I think she’s a little twisted—sexually, I mean.”

“So is she seeing anyone?”

“She’s like a little sister to me, Fresh. Don’t you have employees like that?”

“Have you never met anyone who works in a record store? There’s no greater repository of unjustified arrogance in the world. I’d poison my employees if I thought I could find replacements.”

“I don’t think she’s seeing anybody, but since the world is about to be taken over by the Forces of Darkness, you may not have time for dating.”

“I don’t know. She seems like she might have an in with the Forces of Darkness. I like her, she’s funny in a sort of macabre way, and she likes Miles.”

“Lily likes Miles Davis?”

“You don’t know that about your little sister?”

Charlie threw his hands up. “Take her, use her, throw her away, I don’t care, she’s only part-time. You can date my daughter, too. She’s going to be six and probably loves Coltrane for all I know.”

“Calm down, you’re overreacting.”

“Just turn around and take me back to that Buddhist center. I’ve got to stop this thing. It’s all on me, Fresh. I’m the Luminatus.”

“You are not.”

“I am,” Charlie said.

“You’re the Great Death—with a capital D? You? You know this to be true?”

“I do,” Charlie said.

“I knew there was something different about you, but I thought that the Luminatus would be—I don’t know—taller.”

“Don’t start with that, okay.”

Minty swung the car off Van Ness into a hotel turnaround.

“Where are you going?” Charlie said.

“To run over some sewer harpies again.”

“Back to the Buddhist center?”

“Uh-huh. You have any weapons besides that stupid sword?”

“My cop friend told me I should get a gun.”

Minty Fresh reached into his moss-green jacket and came out with the biggest pistol Charlie had ever seen. He placed it on the seat. “Take it. Desert Eagle fifty-caliber. It’ll stop a bear.”

Charlie picked up the chrome-plated pistol. It weighed like five pounds and the barrel looked big enough to stick your thumb in.

“This thing is huge.”

“I’m a big guy. Listen, it holds eight shots. There’s a round in the chamber. You have to cock it and release the safety before you fire. There and there.” He pointed to the safety and the hammer. “Hold on to it if you have to shoot. It will knock you on your ass if you’re not ready.”

“What about you?”

Minty patted the other side of his coat. “I have another one.”

Charlie turned the gun in his hand and watched the streetlights playing off its chromed surface. (Beta Males, who inherently feel they are always at a competitive disadvantage, are suckers for showy equalizers.) “You have a lot going on under the surface, Mr. Fresh. You are not just the run-of-the-mill seven-foot-tall Death Merchant in a pastel-green suit.”

“Thank you, Mr. Asher. Very kind of you to say.”

“My pleasure.”

Charlie’s cell phone rang and he flipped it open.

Rivera said, “Asher, where the hell are you? I’ve been circling the Mission and there’s nothing here but a lot of black feathers flying in the air.”

“Yeah, it’s okay. I’m okay, Inspector. I found Minty Fresh, the guy who owns the music store. I’m in the car with him.”

“So you’re safe?”

“Relatively.”

“Good. Lay low and I’ll call you, okay? I want to talk to your friend tomorrow.”

“You got it, Inspector. Thanks for coming to help.”

“Careful, Asher.”

“Gotcha. I’m laying low. Bye.”

Charlie snapped the phone shut and turned to Minty Fresh. “You ready?”

“Absolutely,” said the fresh one.

The street was deserted when they pulled up in front of the Three Jewels Buddhist Center.

“I’ll go around to the back,” Minty said.

Well, cars suck, I can tell you that,” said Babd, trying to keep herself together as the Morrigan limped back to the great ship. “Five thousand years, horses are fine, all of a sudden we have to have paved streets and cars. I don’t see the attraction.”

“I’m not even sure that we need to rise and let Darkness rule,” said Nemain. “Apparently darkness isn’t qualified yet. Speaking as an agent of Darkness, I think it needs more time.” She had been crushed into a half-woman, half-raven form and was shedding feathers as they limped through the pipe.

“It’s like that New Meat has someone watching over him,” said Macha. “Next time Orcus can deal with him.”

“Yeah, let’s get Orcus to go after him,” Babd said. “See what he thinks of cars.”

24 AUDREY AND THE SQUIRREL PEOPLE

Charlie could hear things scurrying under the porch as he walked to the front door of the Buddhist center, but the weight of the enormous pistol he’d stuck down the back of his belt reassured him, even if it was pulling his pants down a little. The front door was nearly twelve feet tall, red, with reeded glass running the length, and there were arrays of colorful Tibetan prayer wheels, like spools, on either side of the door. Charlie knew what they were because he’d once had a thief try to sell him some hot ones stolen from a temple.

Charlie knew he should kick down the door, but then, it was a really big door, and although he had watched a lot of cop shows and movies where door kicking had been done, he was inexperienced himself. Another option was to pull his pistol and blast the lock off the door, but he didn’t know any more about lock blasting than he did door kicking, so he decided to ring the doorbell.

The scurrying noises increased and he could hear heavier footsteps inside. The door swung open and the pretty brunette he knew as Elizabeth Sarkoff—Esther Johnson’s fake niece—stood in the doorway.

“Why, Mr. Asher, what a pleasant surprise.”

It won’t be for long, sister, said his inner tough guy. “Mrs. Sarkoff, nice to see you. What are you doing here?”

“I’m the receptionist. Come in, come in.”

Charlie stepped into the foyer, which opened up to a staircase and had sliding double doors on either side. He could see that straight back the foyer led to a dining room with a long table, and beyond that a kitchen. The house had been restored nicely, and didn’t really have the appearance of a public building.

The inner tough guy said, Don’t try to run your game on me, floozy. I’ve never hit a dame before, but if I don’t get some straight talk quick, I’m willing to give it a try, see. Charlie said, “I had no idea you were a Buddhist. That’s fascinating. How’s your Aunt Esther, by the way?” He had her now, didn’t even have to slap her around.

“Still dead. Thanks for asking, though. What can I do for you, Mr. Asher?”

The sliding door to the left of them opened an inch and someone, a young man’s voice, said, “Master, we need you.”

“I’ll be right there,” said the alleged Mrs. Sarkoff.

“Master?” Charlie raised an eyebrow.

“We hold receptionists in very high regard in the Buddhist tradition.” She grinned, really big and goofy, like she didn’t even believe it herself. Charlie was totally charmed by the laughter and open surrender in her eyes. Trust there, with no reason for it.

“Good God, you’re a bad liar,” he said.

“Guess you could see right through my moo-poo, huh?” Big grin.

“So, you are?” Charlie offered his hand to shake.

“I am the Venerable Amitabha Audrey Rinpoche.” She bowed. “Or just Audrey, if you’re in a hurry.” She took two of Charlie’s fingers and shook them.

“Charlie Asher,” Charlie said. “So you’re not really Mrs. Johnson’s niece.”

“And you’re not really a used-clothing dealer?”

“Well, actually—”

That’s all Charlie got out. There was a crashing sound from straight ahead, glass and splintering wood. Then he saw the table go over in the next room and Minty Fresh screamed “Freeze!” as he leapt over the fallen table and headed toward them, gun in hand, oblivious, evidently, to the fact that he was seven feet tall and that the doorway, built in 1908, was only six feet eight inches high.

“Stop,” Charlie shouted, about a half second too late, as Minty Fresh drove four inches of forehead into some very nicely finished oak trim above the door with a thud that shook the whole house. His feet continued on, his body swinging after, and at one point he was parallel to the floor, about six feet off the ground, when gravity decided to manifest itself.

The chrome Desert Eagle clattered all the way through the foyer and hit the front door. Minty Fresh landed flat and quite unconscious on the floor between Charlie and Audrey.

“And this is my friend Minty Fresh,” Charlie said. “He doesn’t do this a lot.”

“Boy, you don’t see that every day,” said Audrey, looking down at the sleeping giant.

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “I don’t know where he found raw silk in moss green.”

“That’s not linen?” Audrey asked.

“No, it’s silk.”

“Hmm, it’s so wrinkled, I thought it must be linen, or a blend.”

“Well, I think maybe all the activity—”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Audrey nodded, then looked at Charlie. “So—”

“Mr. Asher.” A woman’s voice to his right. The doors on Charlie’s right slid open, and an older woman stood there: Irena Posokovanovich. The last time he’d seen her he was sitting in the back of Rivera’s cruiser, in handcuffs.

“Mrs. Posokov…Mrs. Posokovano—Irena! How are you?”

“You weren’t so concerned about that yesterday.”

“No, I was. I really was. Sorry about that.” Charlie smiled, thinking it was his most charming smile. “I hope you don’t have that pepper spray with you.”

“I don’t,” Irena said.

Charlie looked at Audrey. “We had a little misunderstanding—”

“I have this,” Irena said, producing a stun gun from behind her back, pressing it to Charlie’s chest and sending a hundred and twenty-five thousand volts surging through his body. He could see animals, or animal-like creatures, dressed in period finery, approaching him as he convulsed in pain on the floor.

“Get them both tied up, guys,” Audrey said. “I’ll make tea.”

Tea?” Audrey said.

So, for the second time in his life, Charlie Asher found himself tied to a chair and being served a hot beverage. Audrey was bent over before him, holding a teacup, and regardless of the awkwardness or danger of the situation, Charlie found himself staring down the front of her shirt.

“What kind of tea?” Charlie asked, buying time, noticing the cluster of tiny silk roses that perched happily at the front clasp of her bra.

“I like my tea like I like my men,” Audrey said with a grin. “Weak and green.”

Now Charlie looked into her eyes, which were smiling. “Your right hand is free,” she said. “But we had to take your gun and your sword-cane, because those things are frowned upon.”

“You’re the nicest captor I’ve ever had,” Charlie said, taking the teacup from her.

“What are you trying to say?” said Minty Fresh.

Charlie looked to his right, where Minty Fresh was tied to a chair that made him look as if he’d been taken hostage at a child’s tea party—his knees were up near his chin and one of his wrists was taped near the floor. Someone had put a large ice pack on his head, which looked vaguely like a tam-o’-shanter.

“Nothing,” Charlie said. “You were a great captor, too, don’t get me wrong.”

“Tea, Mr. Fresh?” Audrey said.

“Do you have coffee?”

“Back in a second,” Audrey said. She left the room.

They’d been moved to one of the rooms off the foyer, Charlie couldn’t tell which. It must have been a parlor for entertaining during its day, but it had been converted into a combination office and reception room: metal desks, a computer, some filing cabinets, and an array of older oak office chairs for working and waiting.

“I think she likes me,” Charlie said.

“She has you taped to a chair,” Minty Fresh said, pulling at the tape around his ankles with his free hand. The ice pack fell off his head and hit the floor with a loud thump.

“I didn’t notice how attractive she was when I met her before.”

“Would you help me get free, please?” Minty said.

“Can’t,” Charlie said. “Tea.” He held up his cup.

Clicking noises by the door. They looked up as four little bipeds in silk and satin scampered into the room. One, who had the face of an iguana, the hands of a raccoon, and was dressed like a musketeer, big-feathered hat and all, drew a sword and poked Minty Fresh in the hand he was using to pull at the duct tape.

“Ow, dammit. Thing!”

“I don’t think he wants you to try to get loose,” Charlie said.

The iguana guy saluted Charlie with a flourish of his sword and pointed to the end of his snout with his free hand, as if to say, On the nose, buddy.

“So,” Audrey said, entering the room carrying a tray with Minty’s coffee, “I see you’ve met the squirrel people.”

“Squirrel people?” Charlie asked.

A little lady with a duck’s face and reptilian hands wearing a purple satin evening gown curtsied to Charlie, who nodded back.

“That’s what we call them,” Audrey said. “Because the first few I made had squirrel faces and hands, but then I ran out of squirrel parts and they got more baroque.”

“They’re not creatures of the Underworld?” Charlie said. “You made them?”

“Sort of,” Audrey said. “Cream and sugar, Mr. Fresh?”

“Please,” Minty said. “You make these monsters?”

All four of the little creatures turned to him at once and leaned back, as if to say, Hey, pal, who are you calling monsters.

“They’re not monsters, Mr. Fresh. The squirrel people are as human as you are.”

“Yeah, except they have better fashion sense,” Charlie said.

“I’m not always going to be taped to this chair, Asher,” Minty said. “Woman, who or what the hell are you?”

“Be nice,” Charlie said.

“I suppose I should explain,” Audrey said.

“Ya think?” Minty said.

Audrey sat down on the floor, cross-legged, and the squirrel people gathered around her, to listen.

“Well, it’s a little embarrassing, but I guess it started when I was a kid. I sort of had this affinity for dead things.”

“Like you liked to touch dead things?” asked Minty Fresh. “Get naked with them?”

“Would you please let the lady talk,” Charlie said.

“Bitch is a freak,” Minty said.

Audrey smiled. “Why, yes; yes, I am, Mr. Fresh, and you are tied up in my dining room, at the mercy of any freaky thing that might occur to me.” She tapped a silver demitasse spoon she’d used to stir her tea on her front tooth and rolled her eyes as if imagining something delicious.

“Please go on,” said Minty Fresh with a shudder. “Sorry to interrupt.”

“It wasn’t a freaky thing,” Audrey said, glancing at Minty, daring him to speak up. “It was just that I had an overdeveloped sense of empathy with the dying, mostly animals, but when my grandmother passed, I could feel it, from miles away. Anyway, it didn’t overwhelm me or anything, but when I got to college, to see if I could get a handle on it, I decided to study Eastern philosophy—oh yeah, and fashion design.”

“I think it’s important to look good when you’re doing the work of the dead,” Charlie said.

“Well—uh—okay,” Audrey said. “And I was a good seamstress. I really liked making costumes. Anyway, I met and fell in love with a guy.”

“A dead guy?” Minty asked.

“Soon enough, Mr. Fresh. He was dead soon enough.” Audrey looked down at the carpet.

“See, you insensitive fuck,” Charlie said. “You hurt her feelings.”

“Hello, tied to a chair here,” Minty said. “Surrounded by little monsters, Asher. Not the insensitive one.”

“Sorry,” Charlie said.

“It’s okay,” Audrey said. “His name was William—Billy, and we were together for two years before he got sick. We’d only been engaged a month when he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. They gave him a couple of months to live. I dropped out of school and stayed with him every moment. One of the nurses from hospice knew about my Eastern studies course and recommended we talk with Dorje Rinpoche, a monk from the Tibetan Buddhist Center in Berkeley. He talked to us about Bardo Thodrol, what you know as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He helped prepare Billy to transfer his consciousness into the next world—into his next life. It took our focus off of the darkness and made death a natural, hopeful thing. I was with Billy when he died, and I could feel his consciousness move on—really feel it—Dorje Rinpoche said that I had some special talent. He thought I should study under a high lama.”

“So you became a monk?” Charlie asked.

“I thought a lama was just a tall sheep,” said Minty Fresh.

Audrey ignored him. “I was heartbroken and I needed direction, so I went to Tibet and was accepted at a monastery where I studied Bardo Thodrol for twelve years under Lama Karmapa Rinpoche, the seventeenth reincarnation of the bodhisattva who had founded our school of Buddhism a thousand years ago. He taught me the art of p’howa—the transference of the consciousness at the moment of death.”

“So you could do what the monk had done for your fiancé?” Charlie asked.

“Yes. I performed p’howa for many of the mountain villagers. It was a sort of a specialty with me—along with making the robes for everyone in the monastery. Lama Karmapa told me that he felt I was a very old soul, the reincarnation of a superenlightened being from many generations before. I thought perhaps he was just trying to test me, to get me to succumb to ego, but when his own death was near and he called me to perform the p’howa for him, I realized that this was the test, and he was trusting the transference of his own soul to me.”

“Just so we’re clear,” said Minty Fresh. “I would not trust you with my car keys.”

The iguana musketeer poked Minty in the calf with his little sword and the big man yelped.

“See,” Charlie said. “When you’re rude it comes back on you—like karma.”

Audrey smiled at Charlie, put her tea on the floor, and folded her legs into the lotus position, settling in. “When the Lama passed, I saw his consciousness leave his body. Then I felt my own consciousness leave my body, and I followed the Lama into the mountains, where he showed me a small cave, buried deep beneath the snow. And in that cave was a stone box, sealed with wax and sinew. He told me that I must find the box, and then he was gone, ascended, and I found myself back in my body.”

“Were you superenlightened then?” Charlie asked.

“I don’t even know what that is,” Audrey said. “The Lama was wrong about that, but something had changed me while performing the p’howa for him. When I came out of the room with his body, I could see a red spot glowing in people, right at their heart chakra. It was the same thing I had followed into the mountains, the undying consciousness—I could see people’s souls. But what was more disturbing to me, I could see that the glow was absent in some people, or I couldn’t see it in them, or in myself. I didn’t know why, but I did know that I had to find that stone box. By following the exact path into the mountains that the Lama had shown me, I did. Inside was a scroll that most Buddhists thought—still think—was a myth: the lost chapter of the Tibetan Book of the Dead…It outlined two long-lost arts, the p’howa of forceful projection, and one I hadn’t even heard of, the p’howa of undying. The first allows you to force a soul from one being to another, and the second allows the practitioner to prolong the transition, the bardo, between life and death indefinitely.”

“Does that mean you could make people live forever?” Charlie asked.

“Sort of—more like they just stop dying. I meditated on the amazing gift I’d been given for months, afraid to try to perform the rituals. But one day when I was attending the bardo of an old man who was dying of a painful stomach cancer, I could watch the suffering no longer, and I tried the p’howa of forceful projection. I guided his soul into the body of his newborn grandson, who I could see had no glow at his heart chakra. I could actually see the glow move across the room and the soul enter the baby. The man died in peace only seconds later.

“A few weeks later I was called to attend the bardo of a young boy who had taken ill and was showing all the signs of imminent death. I couldn’t bear to let it happen, knowing that there might be something I might be able to do, so I performed the p’howa of undying on him, and he didn’t die. In fact, he got better. I succumbed to the ego of it, then, and I started to perform the ritual on other villagers, instead of helping them on to their next life. I did five in as many months, but there was a problem. The parents of the little boy summoned me. He wasn’t growing—not even his hair and nails. He was stuck at age nine. But by then the villagers were all coming to me with the dying, and word spread throughout the mountains to other villages. They lined up outside of our monastery, demanding I come see them. But I had refused to perform the ritual, realizing that I was not helping these people, but in fact freezing them in their spiritual progression, plus, you know, kind of freaking them out.”

“Understandably,” Charlie said.

“I couldn’t explain to my fellow monks what was happening. So I ran away in the night. I presented myself to be of service to a Buddhist center in Berkeley, and I was accepted as a monk. It was during that time that I saw, for the first time, a human soul contained in an inanimate object, when I went into a music store in the Castro. It was your music store, Mr. Fresh.”

“I knew that was you,” said Minty. “I told Asher about you.”

“He did,” Charlie said. “He said you were very attractive.”

“I did not,” Minty said.

“He did. ‘Nice eyes,’ he said,” Charlie said. “Go on.”

“There was no mistaking it, though—the glow in the CD—it was exactly the same presence that I could sense in people who had a soul. Needless to say, I was freaked out.”

“Needless to say,” Charlie said. “I had a similar experience.”

Audrey nodded. “I was going to discuss all of this with my master at the center, you know, come clean about what I had learned in Tibet—turn the scrolls over to someone who perhaps understood what was going on with the souls inside of objects, but after only a few months, word came from Tibet that I had left under suspicious circumstances. I don’t know what details they gave, but I was asked to leave the center.”

“So you formed a posse of spooky animal things and moved to the Mission,” said Minty Fresh. “That’s nice. You can let me loose from this chair now and I’ll be on my way.”

“Fresh, will you please let Audrey finish telling her story. I’m sure there’s a perfectly innocent reason that she hangs out with a posse of spooky animal things.”

Audrey pressed on. “I was able to get a job as costumer for a local theater group, and being around theater people, basically a bunch of born show-offs, can put you back into the swing of a life. I tried to forget about my practice in Tibet, and I focused on my work, trying to let my creativity drive me. I couldn’t afford to make full-sized costumes, so I began to create smaller versions. I bought a collection of stuffed squirrels from a secondhand store in the Mission, and used those as my first models. Later I made my models out of other taxi-dermied animal parts—mixing and matching them, but I’d already started calling them my squirrel people. A lot of them have bird feet, chicken and duck, because I could purchase them in Chinatown, along with things like turtle heads and—well, you can buy a lot of dead-animal parts in Chinatown.”

“Tell me about it,” Charlie said. “I live a block from the shark parts store. Never actually tried to build a shark from spare parts, though. Bet that would be fun.”

“Y’all are twisted,” Minty said. “Both of you—you know that, right? Messin’ with dead things and all.”

Charlie and Audrey each raised an eyebrow at him. A creature in a blue kimono with the face of a dog skull gave Minty the critical eye socket and would have raised an eyebrow at him if she’d had one.

“All right, go on,” Minty said, waving Audrey on with his free hand. “You made your point.”

Audrey sighed. “So I started to hit all of the secondhand stores in the City, looking for everything from buttons to hands. And at at least eight stores, I found the soul objects—all grouped together at each store. I realized that I wasn’t the only one who could see them glowing red. Someone was imprisoning these souls in the objects. That’s how I came to know about you gentlemen, whatever you are. I had to get these souls out of your hands. So I bought them. I wanted them to move on to their next rebirth, but I didn’t know how. I thought about using the p’howa of forceful projection, forcing a soul into someone who I could see was soulless, but that process takes time. What would I do, tie them up? And I didn’t even know if it would work. After all, that method was used to force a soul from one person to another, not from an inanimate object.”

Charlie said, “So you tried this forceful-projection thing with one of your squirrel people?”

“Yeah, and it worked. But what I didn’t count on is that they became animated. She started walking around, doing things, intelligent things. Which is how they came to be these little guys you’ve seen today.

“More tea, Mr. Asher?” Audrey smiled and held the teapot out to Charlie.

“Those things have human souls?” Charlie asked. “That’s heinous.”

“Oh yeah, and it’s better that you have the soul imprisoned in an old pair of sneakers in your shop. They’re only in the squirrel people until I can figure how to put their souls into a person. I wanted them saved from you and your kind.”

“We’re not the bad guys. Tell her, Fresh, we’re not the bad guys.”

“We’re not the bad guys,” Minty said. “Can I get some more coffee?”

“We’re Death Merchants,” Charlie said, but it came out much less cheerful-sounding than he’d hoped. He was very desperate for Audrey not to think of him as a bad guy. Like most Beta Males, he didn’t realize that being a good guy was not necessarily an attraction to women.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Audrey said, “I couldn’t just let you guys sell the souls like so much secondhand junk.”

“That’s how they find their next rebirth,” Minty said.

“What?” Audrey looked at Charlie for confirmation.

Charlie nodded. “He’s right. We get the souls when someone dies, and then someone buys them and they get to their next life. I’ve seen it happen.”

“No way,” Audrey said, overpouring Minty’s coffee.

“Yep,” Charlie said. “We can see the red glow, but not in people’s bodies like you. Only in the objects. When someone who needs a soul comes in contact with the object, the glow goes out. The soul moves into them.”

“I thought you’d trapped the souls between lives. You’re not holding these souls prisoner?”

“Nope.”

“It wasn’t us after all,” Minty Fresh said to Charlie. “She was the one that brought all of this on.”

“What on? What?” Audrey said.

“There are Forces of Darkness—we don’t know what they are,” Charlie said. “What we’ve seen are giant ravens, and these demon-like women, we call them sewer harpies because they’ve come out of the storm sewers. They gain strength when they get hold of a soul vessel—and they’re getting really strong. The prophecy says they are going to rise in San Francisco and darkness will cover the world.”

“And they are in the sewers?” Audrey said.

Both Death Merchants nodded.

“Oh no, that’s how the squirrel people get around town without being seen. I’ve sent them to the different stores in the City to get the souls. I must have been sending them right to these creatures. And a lot of them haven’t come home. I thought they just might be lost, or wandering around. They do that. They have the potential of full human consciousness, but something is lost with time out of the body. Sometimes they can get a little goofy.”

“No kidding,” said Charlie. “So is that why iguana boy over there is gnawing on the light cord?”

“Ignatius, get off there! If you electrocute yourself the only place I have to put your soul is that Cornish hen I got at the Safeway. It’s still frozen and I don’t have any pants that will fit it.” She turned to Charlie with an embarrassed smile. “The things you never think you’ll hear yourself say.”

“Yeah, kids, what are you gonna do?” Charlie said, trying to sound easygoing. “You know, one of your squirrel people shot me with a crossbow.”

Audrey looked distraught now. Charlie wanted to comfort her. Give her a hug. Kiss her on the top of the head and tell her that everything was all right. Maybe even get her to untie him.

“They did? Crossbow, oh, that would be Mr. Shelly. He was a spy or something in a former life—had a habit of going off on his own little missions. I sent him to keep an eye on you and report back so I could figure out what you were doing. No one was supposed to get hurt. He never came home. I’m really sorry.”

“Report back?” Charlie said. “They can talk?”

“Well, they don’t talk,” Audrey said. “But some of them can read and write. Mr. Shelly could actually type. I’ve been working on that. I need to get them a voice box that works. I tried one out of a talking doll, but I just ended up with a ferret in a samurai outfit that cried and kept asking if it could go play in the sandbox, it was unnerving. It’s a strange process, as long as there’s organic parts, stuff that was once living, they knit together, they work. Muscles and tendons make their own connections. I’ve been using hams for the torsos, because it gives them a lot of muscle to work with, and they smell better until the process is finished. You know, smoky. But some things are a mystery. They don’t grow voice boxes.”

“They don’t appear to grow eyes, either,” Charlie said, gesturing with his teacup at a creature whose head was an eyeless cat skull. “How do they see?”

“Got me.” Audrey shrugged. “It wasn’t in the book.”

“Man, I know that feeling,” said Minty Fresh.

“So I’ve been experimenting with a voice box made out of catgut and cuttlebone. We’ll see if the one who has it learns to talk.”

“Why don’t you put the souls back in human bodies?” asked Minty. “I mean, you can, right?”

“I suppose,” Audrey said. “But to be honest, I didn’t have any human corpses lying around the house. But there does have to be a piece of human being in them—I learned that from experimenting—a finger bone, blood, something. I got a great deal on a backbone in a junk store in the Haight and I’ve been using one vertebra for each of them.”

“So you’re like some monstrous reanimator,” Charlie said. Then he quickly added, “And I mean that in the nicest way.”

“Thanks, Mr. Death Merchant.” Audrey smiled back and went to the nearby desk for some scissors. “But it looks like I need to cut you loose and hear how you guys got into your line of work. Mr. Greenstreet, could you bring us some more tea and coffee?”

A creature with a beaver’s skull for a head, wearing a fez and a red satin smoking jacket, bowed and scampered by Charlie, headed toward the kitchen.

“Nice jacket,” Charlie said.

The beaver guy gave him a thumbs-up as he passed. Lizard thumbs.

25 THE RHYTHM OF LOST AND FOUND

The Emperor was camped in some bushes near an open culvert that drained into Lobos Creek in the Presidio, the land point on the San Francisco side of the Golden Gate where forts had stood from the time of the Spanish, but had recently been turned into a park. The Emperor had wandered the city for days, calling into storm drains, following the sound of his lost soldier’s barking. The faithful retriever Lazarus had led him here, one of the few drains in the city where the Boston terrier might be able to exit without being washed into the Bay. They camped under a camouflage poncho and waited. Mercifully, it hadn’t rained since Bummer had chased the squirrel into the storm sewer, but dark clouds had been bubbling over the City for two days now, and whether or not they were bringing rain, they made the Emperor fear for his city.

“Ah, Lazarus,” said the Emperor, scratching his charge behind the ears, “if we had even half the courage of our small comrade, we would go into that drain and find him. But what are we without him, our courage, our valor? Steady and righteous we may be, my friend, but without courage to risk ourselves for our brother, we are but politicians—blustering whores to rhetoric.”

Lazarus growled low and hunkered back under the poncho. The sun had just set, but the Emperor could see movement back in the culvert. As he climbed to his feet, the six-foot pipe was filled with a creature that crawled out and virtually unfolded in the creekbed—a huge, bullheaded thing, with eyes that glowed green and wings that unfurled like leathery umbrellas.

As they watched the creature took three steps and leapt into the twilight sky, his wings beating like the sails of a death ship. The Emperor shuddered, and considered for a moment moving their camp into the City proper, perhaps passing the night on Market Street, with people and policemen streaming by, but then he heard the faintest barking coming from deep in the culvert.

Audrey was showing them around the Buddhist center, which, except for the office in the front, and a living room that had been turned into a meditation room, looked very much like any other sprawling Victorian home. Austere and Oriental in its decor, yes, and perhaps the smell of incense permeating it, but still, just a big old house.

“It’s just a big old house, really,” she said, leading them into the kitchen.

Minty Fresh was making Audrey feel a little uncomfortable. He kept picking at bits of duct-tape adhesive that had stuck to the sleeve of his green jacket, and giving Audrey a look like he was saying, This better come out when it’s dry-cleaned or it’s your ass. His size alone was intimidating, but now a series of large knots were rising on his forehead where he’d smacked the doorway, and he looked vaguely like a Klingon warrior, except for the pastel-green suit, of course. Maybe the agent for a Klingon warrior.

“So,” he said, “if the squirrel people thought I was a bad guy, why did they save me from the sewer harpy in the train last week? They attacked her and gave me time to get away.”

Audrey shrugged. “I don’t know. They were supposed to just watch you and report back. They must have seen that what was after you was much worse than you. They are human, at heart, you know.”

She paused in front of the pantry door and turned to them. She hadn’t seen the debacle in the street, but Esther had been watching through the window and had told her what had happened—about the womanlike creatures that had been coming after Charlie. Evidently these strange men were allies of a sort, practicing what she had taken on as her holy work: helping souls to move to their next existence. But the method? Could she trust them?

“So, from what you guys are saying, there are thousands of humans walking around without souls?”

“Millions, probably,” Charlie said.

“Maybe that explains the last election,” she said, trying to buy time.

“You said you could see if people had one,” said Minty Fresh.

He was right, but she’d seen the soulless and never thought about their sheer numbers, and what happened when the dead didn’t match with the born. She shook her head. “So the transfer of souls depends on material acquisition? That’s just so—I don’t know—sleazy.”

“Audrey, believe me,” Charlie said, “we’re both as baffled by the mechanics of it as you are, and we’re instruments of it.”

She looked at Charlie, really looked at him. He was telling the truth. He had come here to do the right thing. She threw open the pantry door and the red light spilled out on them.

The pantry was nearly as big as a modern bedroom, and every shelf from floor to ceiling and most of the floor space was covered with glowing soul vessels.

“Jeez,” Charlie said.

“I got as many as I could—or, the squirrel people did.”

Minty Fresh ducked into the pantry and stood in front of a shelf full of CDs and records. He grabbed a handful and started shuffling through them, then turned to her, holding up a half-dozen CD cases fanned out. “These are from my store.”

“Yes. We got all of them,” Audrey said.

“You broke into my store.”

“She kept them from the bad guys, Minty,” Charlie said, stepping in the pantry. “She probably saved them, maybe saved us.”

“No way, man, none of this would be happening if it wasn’t for her.”

“No, it was always going to happen. I saw it in the other Great Big Book, in Arizona.”

“I was just trying to help them,” Audrey said.

Charlie was staring at the CDs in Minty’s hand. He seemed to have fallen into some sort of trance, and reached out and took the CDs as if he were moving through some thick liquid—then shuffled away all but one, which he just stared at, then flipped over to look at the back. He sat down hard in the pantry and Audrey caught his head to keep him from bumping it on the shelf behind him.

“Charlie,” she said. “Are you okay?”

Minty Fresh squatted down next to Charlie and looked at the CD—reached for it, but Charlie pulled it away. Minty looked at Audrey. “It’s his wife,” he said.

Audrey could see the name Rachel Asher scratched into the back of the CD case and she felt her heart breaking for poor Charlie. She put her arms around him. “I’m so sorry, Charlie. I’m so sorry.”

Tears splattered on the CD case and Charlie wouldn’t look up.

Minty Fresh stood and cleared his throat, his face clear of any rage or accusation. He seemed almost ashamed. “Audrey, I’ve been driving around the City for days, I could sure use a place to lie down if you have it.”

She nodded, her face against Charlie’s back. “Ask Esther, she’ll show you.”

Minty Fresh ducked out of the pantry.

Audrey held Charlie and rocked him for a long time, and even though he was lost in the world of that CD that held the love of his life, and she was outside, crouched in a pantry that glowed red with cosmic bric-a-brac, she cried with him.

After an hour passed, or maybe it was three, because that’s the way time is in grief and love, Charlie turned to her and said, “Do I have a soul?”

“What?” she said.

“You said you could see people’s souls glowing in them—do I have a soul?”

“Yes, Charlie. Yes, you have a soul.”

He nodded, turning away from her again, but pushing back against her.

“You want it?” he said.

“Nah, I’m good,” she said. But she wasn’t.

She took the CD out of his hand, pried his hands off of it, really, and put it with the others. “Let’s let Rachel rest and go in the other room.”

“Okay,” Charlie said. He let her help him up.

Upstairs, in a little room with cushions all over the floor and pictures of the Buddha reclining amid lotuses, they sat and talked by candlelight. They’d shared their histories, of how they had come to be where they were, what they were, and with that out of the way, they talked about their losses.

“I’ve seen it again and again,” Charlie said. “More with men than with women, but definitely with both—a wife or husband dies, and it’s like the survivor is roped to him like a mountain climber who’s fallen into a crevasse. If the survivor can’t let go—cut them loose, I guess—the dead will drag them right into the grave. I think that would have happened to me, if it wasn’t for Sophie, and maybe even becoming a Death Merchant. There was something bigger than me going on, something bigger than my pain. That’s the only reason I made it this far.”

“Faith,” Audrey said. “Whatever that is. It’s funny, when Esther came to me, she was angry. Dying and angry—she said that she’d believed in Jesus all her life, now she was dying and He said she was going to live forever.”

“So you told her, ‘Sucks to be you, Esther.’”

Audrey threw a cushion at him. She liked the way that he could find the silliness in such dark territory. “No, I told her that He told her that she’d live forever, but He didn’t say how. Her faith hadn’t been betrayed at all, she just needed to open to a broader understanding.”

“Which was total bullshit,” Charlie said.

Another cushion bounced off his forehead. “No, it wasn’t moo-poo. If anyone should understand the significance of the book not covering everything in detail, it should be you—us.”

“You can’t say ‘bullshit,’ can you?”

Audrey felt herself blush and was glad they were in the dim orange candlelight. “I’m talking faith, over here, you want to give me a break?”

“Sorry. I know—or, I think I know what you mean. I mean, I know that there’s some sort of order to all this, but I don’t know how someone can reconcile, say, a Catholic upbringing with a Tibetan Book of the Dead, with a Great Big Book of Death, secondhand dealers selling objects with human souls, and vicious raven women in the sewers. The more I know, the less I understand. I’m just doing.”

“Well, the Bardo Thodrol talks about hundreds of monsters you will encounter as your consciousness makes its journey into death and rebirth, but you’re instructed to ignore them, as they are illusions, your own fears trying to keep your consciousness from moving on. They can’t really harm you.”

“I think this may be something they left out of the book, Audrey, because I’ve seen them, I’ve fought with them, wrenched souls out of their grasp, watched them take bullets and get hit by cars and keep going—they are definitely not illusions and they definitely can hurt you. The Great Big Book isn’t clear about the specifics, but it definitely talks about the Forces of Darkness trying to take over our world, and how the Luminatus will rise and do battle with them.”

“Luminatus?” Audrey said. “Something to do with light?”

“The big Death,” Charlie said. “Death with a capital D. Sort of the Kahuna, the Big Cheese, the Boss Death. Like Minty and the other Death Merchants would be Santa’s helpers, the Luminatus would be Santa.”

“Santa Claus is the big Death?!” Audrey said, wide-eyed.

“No, that’s just an example—” Charlie saw she was trying not to laugh. “Hey, I’ve been bruised and electrocuted and tied up and traumatized tonight.”

“So my seduction strategy is working?” Audrey grinned.

Charlie was flustered. “I didn’t—I wasn’t—was I staring at your breasts? Because if I was, it was totally by accident, because, you know—there they were, and—”

“Shh.” She reached over and put her finger on his lips to shush him. “Charlie, I feel very close to you right now, and very connected to you right now, and I want to keep that connection going, but I’m exhausted, and I don’t think I can talk anymore. I think I’d like you to come to bed with me.”

“Really? Are you sure?”

“Am I sure? I haven’t had sex in fourteen years—and if you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have told you that I’d rather face one of your raven monsters than go to bed with a man, but now I’m here, with you, and I’m as sure as I’ve ever been of anything.” She smiled, then looked away. “I mean, if you are.”

Charlie took her hand. “Yeah,” he said. “But I was going to tell you something important.”

“Can’t it wait till morning?”

“Sure.”

They spent the night in each other’s arms, and whatever fears or insecurities they had been feeling turned out to be illusions. Loneliness evaporated off of them like the steam off dry ice, and by morning it was just a cloud on the ceiling of the room, then gone with the light.

During the night someone had picked up the dining-room table and cleaned up the mess Minty Fresh had made when he crashed through the kitchen door. He was sitting at the table when Charlie came down.

“They towed my car,” said Minty Fresh. “There’s coffee.”

“Thanks.” Charlie skipped across the dining room to the kitchen. He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down with Minty. “How’s your head?”

The big man touched the purple bruise on his forehead. “Better. How’re you doing?”

“I accidentally shagged a monk last night.”

“Sometimes, in times of crisis, that shit cannot be avoided. How are you doing besides that?”

“I feel wonderful.”

“Yeah, imagine the rest of us all bummed about the end of the world, not being cheerful.”

“Not the end of the world, just darkness over everything,” Charlie cheerfully said. “It gets dark—turn on a light.”

“Good for you, Charlie. Now ’scuse me, I got to go get my car out of impound before you start with the whole ‘if life gives you lemons you make lemonade’ speech and I have to beat you senseless.”

(It’s true, there is little more obnoxious than a Beta Male in love. So conditioned is he to the idea that he will never find love, that when he does, he feels as if the entire world has fallen into step with his desires—and thus deluded, he may act accordingly. It’s a time of great joy and danger for him.)

“Wait, we can share a cab. I have to go home and get my date book.”

“Me, too. I left mine on the front seat of the car. You know those two clients I missed—they’re here. Alive.”

“Audrey told me,” Charlie said. “There’s six of them altogether. She did that p’howa of undying thing on them. Obviously that’s what’s been causing the cosmic shit storm, but what can we do? We can’t kill them.”

“No, I think it’s what you said. The battle is going to happen here in San Francisco and it’s going to happen now. And since you’re the Luminatus, I guess this whole thing is riding on your shoulders. So I’d say we’re doomed.”

“Maybe not. I mean, every time they’ve almost gotten me, something or someone has intervened to pull out a victory. I think destiny is on our side. I feel very optimistic about this.”

“That’s just because you just shagged the monk,” said Minty.

“I’m not a monk,” said Audrey, bounding into the room with a sheaf of papers in hand.

“Oh, shit,” said the Death Merchants in unison.

“No, it’s okay,” Audrey said. “He did shag me, or, I think more appropriately—we shagged—but I’m not a monk anymore. Not because of the shagging, you know, it was a preshag decision.” She threw her papers on the table and climbed into Charlie’s lap. “Hey, good-looking, how’s your morning going?” She gave him a backbreaking kiss and entwined him like a starfish trying to open an oyster until Minty Fresh cleared his throat and she turned to him. “And good morning to you, Mr. Fresh.”

“Yes. Thank you.” Minty leaned to the side so he could see Charlie. “Whether they were here for you, or for our clients who didn’t die, they’ll be back, you know that?”

“The Morrigan?” said Audrey.

“Huh,” said the Death Merchants, again in chorus.

“You guys are so cute,” Audrey gushed. “They’re called the Morrigan. Raven women—personifications of death in the form of beautiful warrior women who can change into birds. There are three of them, all part of the same collective queen of the Underworld known as the Morrigan.”

Charlie leaned back from her so he could look her in the eye. “How do you know that?”

“I just looked it up on the Internet.” Audrey climbed out of Charlie’s lap, picked up the papers on the table, and began to read. “‘The Morrigan consists of three distinct entities: Macha, who haunts the battlefield, and takes heads of warriors as tribute in battle—she is said to be able to heal a warrior from mortal wounds in the field, if his men have offered enough heads to her. The Celtic warriors called the severed heads Macha’s acorns. She is considered the mother goddess of the three. Babd is rage, the passion of battle and killing—she was said to collect the seed of fallen warriors, and use its power to inspire a sexual frenzy for battle, a literal bloodlust. And Nemain, who is frenzy, was said to drive soldiers into battle with a howl so fierce that it could cause enemy soldiers to die of fright—her claws were venomous and the mere prick of one would kill a soldier, but she would fling the venom into the eyes of enemy soldiers to blind them.’”

“That’s them,” said Minty Fresh. “I saw venom come from the claws of the one on the BART.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said, “and I think I remember Babd—the bloodlust one. That’s them. I have to talk to Lily. I sent her to Berkeley to find out about them, but she came back with nothing. She must have not even looked.”

“Yeah, ask her if she’s seeing anybody,” Minty Fresh said. To Audrey: “Did it say how you kill them? What their weaknesses are?”

Audrey shook her head. “Just that warriors took dogs into battle to protect against the Morrigan.”

“Dogs,” Charlie echoed. “That explains why my daughter got the hellhounds to protect her. I’m telling you, Fresh, we’re going to be okay. Destiny is on our side.”

“Yeah, you said that. Call us a cab.”

“I wonder why of all the different gods and demons in the Underworld, the Celtic ones are here.”

“Maybe they’re all here,” Minty said. “I had a crazy Indian tell me once that I was the son of Anubis, the Egyptian jackal-headed god of the dead.”

“That’s great!” Charlie said. “A jackal—that’s a type of dog. You have natural abilities to battle the Morrigan, see.”

Minty looked at Audrey. “If you don’t do something to disappoint him and mellow his ass out, I’m going to shoot him.”

“Oh yeah,” Charlie said. “Can I still borrow one of your big guns?”

Minty unfolded to his feet. “I’m going outside to call a cab and wait, Charlie. If you’re coming, you better start saying good-bye now, because I’m leaving when it gets here.”

“Swell,” Charlie said, looking adoringly at Audrey. “I think we’re safe in the daylight anyway.”

“Monk shagger,” Minty growled as he ducked under the doorway.

Auntie Cassie let Charlie into their small home in the Marina district and Sophie called off the greeting hump of devil dogs almost as soon as it started.

“Daddy!”

Charlie swept Sophie up in his arms and squeezed her until she started to change color; then, when Jane came out of the kitchen, he grabbed her in his other arm and hugged her as well.

“Uh, let go,” Jane said, pushing him away. “You smell like incense.”

“Oh, Jane, I can’t believe it, she’s so wonderful.”

“He got laid,” Cassandra said.

“You got laid?” Jane said, kissing her brother on the cheek. “I’m so happy for you. Now let me go.”

“Daddy got laid,” Sophie said to the hellhounds, who seemed very happy at hearing the news.

“No, not laid,” Charlie said, and there was a collective sigh of disappointment.

“Well, yes, laid,” and there was a collective sigh of relief, “but that’s not the thing. The thing is she’s wonderful. She’s gorgeous, and kind, and sweet, and—”

“Charlie,” Jane interrupted, “you called us and told us that there was some great danger and we had to go get Sophie and protect her, and you were going on a date?”

“No, no, there was—is danger, at least in the dark, and I did need you to get Sophie, but I met someone.”

“Daddy got laid!” Sophie cheered again.

“Honey, we don’t say that, okay,” Charlie said. “Auntie Jane and Auntie Cassie shouldn’t say that either. It’s not nice.”

“Like ‘kitty’ and ‘not in the butt’?”

“Exactly, honey.”

“Okay, Daddy. So it wasn’t nice?”

“Daddy has to go to our house and get his date book, pumpkin, we’ll talk about this later. Give me a kiss.” Sophie gave him a huge hug and a kiss and Charlie thought that he might cry. For so long she had been his only future, his only joy, and now he had this other joy, and he wanted to share it with her. “I’ll come right back, okay?”

“Okay. Let me down.”

Charlie let her slide to the floor and she ran off to another part of the house.

“So it wasn’t nice?” Jane asked.

“I’m sorry, Jane. This is really crazy. I hate that I put you guys in the middle of it. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Jane thumped him in the arm. “So it was nice?”

“It was really nice,” Charlie said, breaking into a grin. “She’s really nice. She’s so nice I miss Mom.”

“Lost me,” Cassandra said.

“Because I’d like Mom to see that I’m doing okay. That I met someone who’s good for me. Who’s going to be good for Sophie.”

“Whoa, don’t jump the gun, there, tiger,” Jane said. “You just met this woman, you need to slow down—and remember, this comes from someone whose typical second date is moving a woman in.”

“Slut,” Cassie murmured.

“I mean it, Jane. She’s amazing.”

Cassie looked at Jane. “You were right, he really did need to get laid.”

“That’s not it!”

Charlie’s cell rang. “Excuse me, guys.” He flipped it open.

“Asher, what the hell have you done?” It was Lily. She was crying. “What the hell have you let loose?”

“What, Lily? What?”

“It was just here. The front window of the shop is gone. Gone! It just came in, ripped through the shop, and took all of your soul thingies. Loaded them into a bag and flew away. Fuck, Asher. I mean FUCK! This thing was huge, and fucking hideous.”

“Yeah, Lily, are you okay? Is Ray okay?”

“Yeah, I’m okay. Ray didn’t come in. I ran into the back when it came through the window. It wasn’t interested in anything but that shelf. Asher, it was as big as a bull and it fucking flew!”

She sounded like she was on the edge of hysteria. “Hold on, Lily. Stay there and I’ll come to you. Go in the back room and don’t open the door until you hear me, okay.”

“Asher, what the fuck was that thing?”

“I don’t know, Lily.”

The bullheaded Death flew into the culvert and immediately fell to all fours to move through the pipe, dragging the bag of souls behind him. Not for much longer—he would not crawl much longer. The time had come, Orcus could feel it. He could feel them converging on the City—the City where he had staked his territory so many years ago—his city. Still, they would come, and they would try to take what was rightfully his. All of the old gods of death: Yama and Anubis and Mors, Thanatos and Charon and Mahakala, Azrael and Emma-O and Ahkoh, Balor, Erebos, and Nyx—dozens of them, gods born of the energy of Man’s greatest fear, the fear of death—all of them coming to rise as the leader of darkness and the dead, as the Luminatus. But he had come here first, and with Morrigan, he would become the one. But first he had to marshal his forces, heal the Morrigan, and take down the wretched human soul stealers of the City.

The satchel of souls would go a long way toward healing his brides. He marched into the grotto where the great ship was moored and leapt into the air, the beat of his great leathery wings like a war drum, echoing off the grotto walls and sending bats to the wing, swirling around the ship’s masts in great clouds.

The Morrigan, torn and broken, were waiting for him on the deck.

“What did I tell you?” Babd said. “It’s really not that great Above, huh? I, for one, could do without cars altogether.”

Jane drove while Charlie fired out phone calls on his cell, first to Rivera, then to Minty Fresh. Within a half an hour they were all standing in Charlie’s store, or the wreckage that had been Charlie’s store, and uniformed policemen had taped off the sidewalk until someone could get the glass swept up.

“The tourists have to love this,” Nick Cavuto said, gnawing an unlit cigar. “Right on the cable-car line. Perfect.”

Rivera was sitting in the back room interviewing Lily while Charlie, Jane, and Cassandra tried to sort through the mess and put things back on their shelves. Minty Fresh stood by the front door, wearing shades, looking entirely too cool for the destruction that lay strewn around him. Sophie was content to sit in the corner and feed shoes to Alvin and Mohammed.

“So,” Cavuto said to Charlie, “some kind of flying monster came through your window and you thought this would be a good place to bring your kid?”

Charlie turned to the big cop and leaned on the counter. “Tell me, Detective, in your professional opinion, what procedure should I use in dealing with robbery by a flying monster? What the fuck is the SFPD giant-fucking-flying-monster protocol, Detective?”

Cavuto stood staring at Charlie as if he’d had water thrown in his face, not really angry, just very surprised. Finally, he grinned around his cigar, and said, “Mr. Asher, I am going to go outside and smoke, call in to the dispatcher, and have her look that particular protocol up. You have stumped me. Would you tell my partner where I’ve gone?”

“I’ll do that,” Charlie said. He went into the office with Lily and Rivera and said, “Rivera, can I get some police protection here at my apartment—officers with shotguns?”

Rivera nodded, patting Lily on the hand as he looked away. “I can give you two, Charlie, but not for longer than twenty-four hours. You sure you don’t want to get out of town?”

“Upstairs we have the security bars and steel doors, we have the hellhounds and Minty Fresh’s weapons, and besides, they’ve already been here. I have a feeling they got what they came for, but the cops would make me feel better.”

Lily looked at Charlie. She was in total mascara meltdown and had smudged her lipstick halfway across her face. “I’m sorry, I thought I would handle it better than this. It was so scary. It wasn’t mysterious and cool, it was horrible. The eyes and the teeth—I peed, Asher. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, kid. You did fine. I’m glad you had the sense to get out of its way.”

“Asher, if you’re the Luminatus, that thing must be your competition.”

“What? What is that?” Rivera said.

“It’s her weird Gothy stuff, Inspector. Don’t worry about it,” Charlie said. He looked through to the door and saw Minty Fresh standing at the front of the shop, looking at him, shrugging, as if saying, Well? So Charlie asked: “Hey, Lily, are you seeing anyone?”

Lily wiped her nose on the sleeve of her chef ’s coat. “Look, Asher—I, uh—I’m going to have to withdraw that offer I made you. I mean, after Ray, I’m not sure I really ever want to do that again. Ever.”

“I wasn’t asking for me, Lily.” Charlie nodded toward the towering Fresh.

“Oh,” Lily said, following his gaze, now wiping her eyes with her sleeves. “Oh. Fuck. Cover for me, I’ve got to regroup.” She dashed into the employee washroom and slammed the door.

Rivera looked at Charlie. “What the hell is going on here?”

Charlie was going to try to come up with some kind of answer when his cell phone rang and he held up his finger to pause time. “Charlie Asher,” he said.

“Charlie, it’s Audrey,” came the whispered voice. “They’re here, right now. The Morrigan are here.”

26 ORPHEUS IN THE STORM SEWER

Charlie parked the van sideways in the street and ran up the steps of the Buddhist center calling her name. The huge front door was hanging askew by one hinge, the glass broken, and every drawer and cabinet had been opened and the contents scattered, every piece of furniture overturned or broken.

“Audrey!”

He heard a voice to the front of the house and ran back out on the porch.

“Audrey?”

“Down here,” she called. “We’re still under the porch.”

Charlie ran down the steps and around to the side of the porch. He could see movement behind the lattice. He found a small gate and opened it. Inside, Audrey was crouched with a half-dozen other people and a whole crowd of the squirrel people. He scrambled into the crawl space and took her in his arms. Charlie had tried to keep her on the line during the drive over, but a few blocks away the battery in his phone had died, and he had tried, for those few terrifying moments, to imagine losing her—his future, his hope—after his hope had just been awakened again. He was so relieved he could barely breathe.

“Are they gone?” Audrey asked.

“Yes, I think so. I’m so glad you’re all right.”

Charlie led them out of the crawl space and back into the house, the squirrel people staying close to the walls and moving quickly so as not to be seen from the street.

Charlie felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to see Irena Posokovanovich smiling at him. He jumped up a couple of steps and screamed. “Don’t shock me again, I’m a good guy.”

“I know that, Mr. Asher. I was wondering if you’d like me to park your van for you before it gets towed away.”

“Oh yes, that would be nice.” He handed her the keys. “Thank you.”

In the house, Audrey said, “She just wants to help.”

“She’s creepy,” Charlie said, but then he caught what he thought was a look of disapproval rising in Audrey’s eyes and he quickly added, “In a completely sweet way, I mean.”

They went directly to the kitchen and stood before the open pantry.

“They got them all,” Audrey said. “That’s why they didn’t hurt us—they weren’t interested in us.”

Charlie was so angry he was having trouble thinking, but without an outlet, he just shook and tried to keep his voice under control. “They just did the same thing at my store. Something did.”

“There must have been three hundred souls in here,” Audrey said.

“They took Rachel’s soul.”

Audrey put her arm around his back, but he couldn’t respond other than to walk out of the kitchen. “That’s it, Audrey. I’m done.”

“What do you mean, you’re done, Charlie? You’re scaring me.”

“Ask your squirrel people where I can get into the storm sewer system. Can they tell you that?”

“Probably. But you can’t do that.”

He wheeled on her and she jumped back.

“I have to do that. Find out, Audrey. Everyone into my van. I want you at my building, where you’ll be safe.”

They were all gathered in Charlie’s living room: Sophie, Audrey, Jane, Cassandra, Lily, Minty Fresh, the undead clients from the Buddhist center, the hellhounds, and fifty or so of the squirrel people. Lily, Jane, and Cassandra were standing on the couch to get away from the squirrel people, who were milling on and around the breakfast bar.

“Nice outfits,” Lily said. “But ewww.”

“Thank you,” Audrey said. Sophie was standing next to Audrey, looking her up and down as if trying to guess her weight.

“I’m a Jewess,” Sophie said. “Are you a Jewess?”

“No, I’m a Buddhist,” Audrey said.

“Is that like a shiksa?”

“Yes, I think it is,” said Audrey. “It’s a type of shiksa.”

“Oh, I guess that’s okay, then. My puppies are shiksas, too. That’s what Mrs. Ling calls them.”

“They’re very impressive puppies, too,” Audrey said.

“They want to eat your little guys, but I won’t let them, okay?”

“Thank you. That would be nice.”

“Unless you’re mean to my daddy. Then they’re toast.”

“Of course,” Audrey said. “Special circumstances.”

“He likes you a lot.”

“I’m glad. I like him a lot.”

“I think you’re probably okay.”

“Well, right back at you,” Audrey said. She smiled at the little brunette with the heartbreaking blue eyes and the attitude, and it was all she could do not to scoop her up and hug the bejeezus out of her.

Charlie jumped up on the couch next to Jane, Cassandra, and Lily, and then realized as he looked across the room at Minty Fresh that he still didn’t stand taller than the Death Merchant, which was a little unnerving. (Minty seemed focused on Lily, which was also a little unnerving.)

“You guys, I’m going to go do something, and I might not come back. Jane, that letter I sent you has all the papers making you Sophie’s legal guardian.”

“I’m out of here,” Lily said.

“No,” Charlie said, catching her by the arm. “I want you here, too. I’m leaving you the business, but with the understanding that a percentage of the profits go to Jane to help with Sophie and will also go into a college fund for her. I know you have your career as a chef, but I trust you and you’re good at the business.”

Lily looked like she wanted to say something sarcastic, but shrugged and said, “Sure. I can run your business and cook, too. You do your Death Merchant thing and raise a daughter.”

“Thanks. Jane, you’ll get the building, of course, but when Sophie grows up, if she wants to stay in the City, you always have to have an apartment for her.”

Jane jumped off the couch. “Charlie, this is crap, I’m not letting you do anything—”

“Please. Jane, I’ve got to go. This is all in writing, I just want you to hear what I wanted in person.”

“Okay,” she said. Charlie hugged his sister, Cassandra, and Lily, then went to the bedroom and gestured for Minty Fresh to follow him.

“Minty, I’m going into the Underworld after the Morrigan—after Rachel’s soul, all the souls. It’s time.”

The big man nodded, gravely. “I’m right there with you.”

“No, you’re not. I need you to stay here and watch over Audrey and Sophie and the others. There are cops outside, but I think their disbelief might make them hesitate if the Morrigan come. You won’t do that.”

Minty shook his head. “What chance do you have down there alone? Let me come with you. We’ll fight this thing together.”

“I don’t think so,” Charlie said. “I’m blessed or something. The prophecy says, ‘The Luminatus will rise and do battle with the Forces of Darkness in the City of Two Bridges.’ It doesn’t say, the Luminatus and his trusty sidekick, Minty Fresh.”

“I am not a sidekick.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” said Charlie, who wasn’t saying that at all. “I’m saying that I have some sort of protection, but you probably don’t. And if I don’t come back, you’ll need to carry on as a Death Merchant in the City—maybe get the scales tipped back for our side.”

Minty Fresh nodded, lowering his gaze to the floor. “You’ll take my Desert Eagles, then, for luck?” He looked up and was grinning.

“I’ll take one of them,” Charlie said.

Minty Fresh slipped out of his shoulder-holster rig and adjusted the straps until they fit Charlie, then helped him into the harness.

“There are two extra clips in here, under your right arm,” Minty said. “I hope you don’t have to fire it that many times down there or you will be one deaf motherfucker.”

“Thanks,” Charlie said.

Minty helped him get his tweed jacket on over the shoulder holster.

“You know, you might be heavily armed, but you still look like an English professor—don’t you have some clothes more appropriate for fighting?”

“James Bond always wears a tux,” Charlie said.

“Yeah, I understand the line between reality and fiction seems a little blurred here lately—”

“I’m kidding,” Charlie said. “There are some motocross leathers and pads in the shop that will fit me if I can find them.”

“Good.” Minty patted Charlie’s shoulders, like he was trying to make them bigger. “You see that bitch with the poison claws, you light her up for me, okay?”

“I’ll buss a cap in da hoe’s ass,” Charlie said.

“Don’t do that.”

“Sorry.”

The hardest part came a few minutes later.

“Honey, Daddy has to go do something.”

“Are you going to get Mommy?”

Charlie was crouched in front of his daughter, and he nearly rolled over backward at the question. She hadn’t mentioned her mommy a dozen times in the last two years.

“Why would you say that, honey?”

“I don’t know. I was thinking about her.”

“Well, you know that she loved you very much.”

“Yeah.”

“And you know that no matter what, I love you very much.”

“Yeah, you said that yesterday.”

“And I meant it yesterday. But this time, I really do have to go. I have to fight some bad guys, and I might not win.”

Sophie’s lower lip pushed out like a big wet shelf.

Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, Charlie chanted in his head. I can’t handle it if you cry.

“Don’t cry, honey. Everything will be okay.”

“Nooooooooooo,” Sophie wailed. “I want to go with you. I want to go with you. Don’t go, Daddy, I want to go with you.”

Charlie held her and looked across the room to his sister, pleading. She came and took Sophie from his arms. “Noooooo. I want to go with you.”

“You can’t go with me, honey.” And Charlie ducked out of the apartment before his heart broke again.

Audrey was waiting in the hall with fifty-three squirrel people. “I’m driving you to the entrance,” she said. “Don’t argue.”

“No,” Charlie said. “I’m not losing you after just finding you. You stay here.”

“You creep! What gives you the right to be that way. I just found you, too.”

“Yeah, but I’m not much of a find.”

“You’re an ass,” she said, and she walked into his arms and kissed him. After a long time, Charlie looked around. The squirrel people were all looking up at them.

“What are they doing here?”

“They’re going with you.”

“No. It’s too risky.”

“Then it’s too risky for you, too. You don’t even know what could be down there—this thing that broke into your store wasn’t one of the Morrigan.”

“I’m not going to be afraid, Audrey. There might be a hundred different demons, but The Book of the Dead is right, they are only keeping us from our path. I think these things exist for the same reason I was chosen to do this, because of fear. I was afraid to live, so I became Death. Their power is our fear of death. I’m not afraid. And I’m not taking the squirrel people.”

“They know the way. And besides, they’re fourteen inches tall, what do they have to live for?”

“Hey,” said a Beefeater guard whose head was the skull of a bobcat.

“Did he say something?” Charlie asked.

“One of my experimental voice boxes.”

“It’s a little squeaky.”

“Hey!”

“Sorry, uh, Beef,” Charlie said. The creatures seemed resolute. “Onward, then!”

Charlie ran down the hall so he wouldn’t have to say good-bye again. Ten yards behind him marched a small army of nightmare creatures, put together from the parts of a hundred different animals. It just so happened that at the time they were reaching the staircase, Mrs. Ling came downstairs to see what all the commotion had been about, and the entire army stopped in the stairway and looked up at her.

Mrs. Ling was, and had always been, a Buddhist, and so she was a firm believer in the concept of karma, and that those lessons you did not learn would continually be presented to you until you learned them, or your soul could never evolve to the next level. That afternoon, as the Forces of Light were about to engage the Forces of Darkness for dominion over the world, Mrs. Ling, staring into the blank eyes of the squirrel people, had her own epiphany, and she never again ate meat, of any kind. Her first act of atonement was an offering to those she felt she had wronged.

“You want snack?” she said.

But the squirrel people marched on.

The Emperor saw the van pull up near the creek and a man in bright yellow motorcycle leathers climb out. The man reached back into the van and grabbed what looked like a shoulder holster with a sledgehammer in it, and slipped into the harness. If the context hadn’t been so bizarre, the Emperor could have sworn it was his friend Charlie Asher, from the secondhand shop in North Beach, but Charlie? Here? With a gun? No.

Lazarus, who was not so dependent on his eyes for recognition, barked a greeting.

The man turned to them and waved. It was Charlie. He walked down to the creekbank across from them.

“Your Majesty,” Charlie said.

“You seem upset, Charlie. Is something wrong?”

“No, no, I’m okay, I just had to take directions from a mute beaver in a fez to get here, it’s unsettling.”

“Well, I can see how it would be,” said the Emperor. “Nice ensemble, though, the leathers and the pistol. Not your usual sartorial splendor.”

“Well, no. I’m on a bit of a mission. Going to go into that culvert, find my way into the Underworld, and do battle with the Forces of Darkness.”

“Good for you. Good for you. Forces of Darkness seem to be on the rise in my city lately.”

“You noticed, then?”

The Emperor hung his head. “Yes, I’m afraid we’ve lost one of our troops to the fiends.”

“Bummer?”

“He went into a storm sewer days ago, and hasn’t come out.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Would you look for him, Charlie? Please. Bring him out.”

“Your Majesty, I’m not sure that I’m coming back myself, but I promise, if I find him, I’ll try to bring him out. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to open this van and I don’t want you to be alarmed by what you see, but I want to get into the pipe while there’s still some light from the grates. What you see coming out of the van—they’re friends.”

“Carry on,” said the Emperor.

Charlie slid the door open and the squirrel people hopped, scampered, and scooted down the bank of the creek toward the culvert. Charlie reached into the van, took out his sword-cane and flashlight, and butt-bumped the door shut. Lazarus whimpered and looked at the Emperor as if someone who was able to talk should say something.

“Good luck, then, valiant Charlie,” said the Emperor. “You go forth with all of us in your heart, and you in ours.”

“You’ll watch the van?”

“Until the Golden Gate crumbles to dust, my friend,” said the Emperor.

And so Charlie Asher, in the service of life and light and all sentient beings, and in hope of rescuing the soul of the love of his life, led an army of fourteen-inch-tall bundles of animal bits, armed with everything from knitting needles to a spork, into the storm sewers of San Francisco.

They slogged on for hours—sometimes the pipes became narrow enough that Charlie had to crawl on his hands and knees, other times they opened into wide junctions like concrete rooms. He helped the squirrel people climb to higher pipes. He’d found a lightweight construction helmet fitted with an LED headlamp, which came in handy in narrow passages where he couldn’t aim the flashlight. He was also bumping his head about ten times an hour, and although the helmet protected him from injury, he’d developed a throbbing headache. His leathers—not really leathers, but more heavy nylon with Lexan pads at the knees, shoulders, elbows, shins, and forearms—were protecting him from bumps and abrasions on the pipes, but they were soaked and rubbing him raw at the backs of his knees. At an open junction with a grate at the top he climbed the ladder and tried to get a look at the neighborhood to perhaps get a sense of where they were, but it had gotten dark out since they started and the grate was under a parked car.

What irony, that he would finally summon his courage and charge into the breach, only to end up lost and stuck in the breach. A human misfire.

“Where the hell are we?” he said.

“No idea,” said the bobcat guy, the one who could talk.

The little Beefeater was disturbing to watch when he spoke, since he really didn’t have a face, only a skull, and he spoke without ever making the P sound. Also, instead of a halberd, which Charlie thought should have come with the costume for authenticity, the bobcat had armed himself with a spork.

“Can you ask the others if they know where we are?”

“Okay.” He turned to the damp gallery of squirrel people. “Hey, anybody know where we are?”

They all shook their heads, looking from one to another, shrugging. Nope.

“No,” said the bobcat.

“Well, I could have done that,” Charlie said.

“Why don’t you? It’s your _arty,” he said. Charlie realized he meant “party.”

“Why no Ps?” Charlie asked.

“No li_s.”

“Right, lips. Sorry. What are you going to do with that spork?”

“Well, when we find some bad guys, I’m going to s_ork the fuck out of them.”

“Excellent. You’re my lieutenant.”

“Because of the s_ork?”

“No, because you can talk. What’s your name?”

“Bob.”

“No really.”

“Really. It’s Bob.”

“So I suppose your last name is Cat.”

“Wilson.”

“Just checking. Sorry.”

“’S okay.”

“Do you remember who you were in your last life?”

“I remember a little. I think I was an accountant.”

“So, no military experience?”

“You need some bodies counted, I’m your man, er, thing.”

“Swell. Does anyone here remember if they used to be a soldier, or a ninja or anything? Extra credit for ninjas or a Viking or something. Weren’t any of you like Attila the Hun or Captain Horatio Hornblower in a former life or something?”

A ferret in a sequined minidress and go-go boots came forward, paw raised.

“You were a naval commander?”

The ferret appeared to whisper into Bob’s hat (since Bob no longer had ears).

“She says no, she misunderstood, she thought you meant horn blower.”

“She was a prostitute?”

“Cornet _layer,” said Bob.

“Sorry,” Charlie said. “It’s the boots.”

The ferret waved him off in a “no worries” way, then leaned over and whispered to Bob again.

“What?” Charlie said.

“Nothing,” Bob said.

“Not nothing. I didn’t think they could talk.”

“Well, not to you,” said Bob.

“What did she say?”

“She said we’re fucked.”

“Well, that’s not a very good attitude,” Charlie said, but he was starting to believe the go-go ferret was right, and he leaned back into a semisitting position in the pipe to rest.

Bob climbed up to a smaller pipe and sat on the edge, his feet dangling over; water dripped from his little patent-leather shoes, but the floral pattern brass buckles still shone in the light of Charlie’s headlamp.

“Nice shoes,” Charlie said.

“Yeah, well, Audrey digs me,” said Bob.

Before Charlie could answer, the dog had grabbed Bob from behind and was shaking him like a rag doll. His mighty spork clattered off the pipe and was lost in the water below.

27 BITCH’S BREW

Lily had been looking all night for a way to approach Minty Fresh. She’d made eye contact with him a dozen times over the course of the evening, and smiled, but with the atmosphere of dread that fell over the room she was having trouble thinking of an opening line. Finally, when an Oprah movie of the week came on the television and everyone gathered around to watch the media diva beat Paul Winfield to death with a steam iron, Minty went to the breakfast bar and started flipping through his day planner, and Lily made her move.

“So, checking your appointments?” she said. “You must be feeling optimistic about how things will go.”

He shook his head. “Not really.”

Lily was smitten. He was beautiful and morose—like a great brown man-gift from the gods.

“How bad can it be?” Lily said, pulling the appointment book out of his hand and flipping through the pages. She stopped on today’s date.

“Why is Asher’s name in here?” she asked.

Minty hung his head. “He said you’ve known all about us for a while.”

“Yeah, but—” She looked at the name again and the realization of what she was seeing was like a punch in the chest. “This is that book? This is your date book for that?”

Minty nodded slowly, not looking at her.

“When did this name show up?” Lily asked.

“It wasn’t there an hour ago.”

“Well, fucksocks,” she said, sitting down on the bar stool next to the big man.

“Yeah,” said Minty Fresh. He put his arm around her shoulders.

With Charlie pulling on the legs of the bobcat guy (who was doing some impressive screaming considering he had prototype vocal cords) and the squirrel people dog-piling onto the Boston terrier, they were eventually able to extricate their lieutenant from the jaws of the bug-eyed fury with only a few snags in his Beefeater’s costume.

“Down, Bummer,” Charlie said. “Just chill.” He didn’t know if chill was an official dog command, but it should be.

Bummer snorted and backed away from the surrounding crowd of squirrel people.

“Not one of us,” said the bobcat guy, pointing at Bummer. “Not one of us.”

“You shut up,” Charlie said. He pulled a beef jerky from his pocket that he’d brought for emergency rations, tore off a hunk, and held it out to Bummer. “Come on, buddy. I told the Emperor I’d look out for you.”

Bummer trotted over to Charlie and took the beef jerky from him, then turned to face down the squirrel people as he chewed. The squirrel people made clicking noises and brandished their weapons. “Not one of us. Not one of us,” chanted Bob.

“Stop that,” Charlie said. “You can’t get a mob chant going, Bob, you’re the only one with a voice box.”

“Oh yeah.” Bob let his chanting trail off. “Well, he’s not one of us,” he added in his defense.

“He is now,” Charlie said. To Bummer he said, “Can you lead us to the Underworld?”

Bummer looked up at Charlie as if he knew exactly what was being asked of him, but if he was going to find the strength to carry on, he was going to need the other half of that beef jerky. Charlie gave it to him and Bummer immediately jumped up to a higher, four-foot pipe, stopped, barked, then took off down the pipe.

“Follow him,” Charlie said.

After an hour following Bummer through the sewers, the pipes gave way to tunnels that got bigger as they moved along. Soon they were moving in caves, with high ceilings and stalactites in the ceiling that glowed in various colors, illuminating their way with a dull, shadowy light. Charlie had read enough about the geology of the area to know that these caves were not natural to the city. He guessed that they were somewhere under the financial district, which was mostly built on Gold Rush landfill, so there would be nothing as old-looking or as solid as these caves.

Bummer kept on, leading them down one fork or another without the slightest hesitation, until suddenly the cave opened up into a massive grotto. The chamber was so large that it simply swallowed up Charlie’s flashlight and headlamp beams, but the ceiling, which was several hundred feet high, was lined with the luminous stalactites that reflected red, green, and purple in a mirror-smooth black lake. In the middle of the lake, probably two hundred yards away, stood a great black sailing ship—tall-masted like a Spanish galleon—red, pulsating light coming from the cabin windows in the rear, a single lantern lighting the deck. Charlie had heard that whole ships had been buried in the debris during the Gold Rush, but they wouldn’t have been left preserved like this. Things had changed, these caves were all the result of the Underworld rising—and he realized that this was just a hint of what was going to happen to the City if the Underworlders took over.

Bummer barked and the sharp report echoed around the grotto, sending a cloud of bats into the air.

Charlie saw movement on the deck of the ship, the blue-black outline of a woman, and he knew that Bummer had led them to the right place. Charlie handed his flashlight to Bob and set his sword-cane on the cave floor. He drew the Desert Eagle from the shoulder holster, checked that there was a round in the chamber, cocked the hammer, then reset the safety and reholstered the pistol.

“We’re going to need a boat,” Charlie said to Bob. “See if you guys can find something we can make a raft from.” The bobcat guy started down the shore with Charlie’s flashlight, scanning the rocks for useful flotsam. Bummer growled, tossed his head like he had ear mites or perhaps to indicate that he thought Charlie was insane, and ran out into the lake. Fifty yards away he was still only in water up to his shoulder.

Charlie looked at the black ship and realized that it was sitting way, way too high out of the water—that, in fact, it was sitting with its hull on the bottom in only about six inches of water.

“Uh, Bob,” Charlie said. “Forget the boat. We’re walking. Everyone quiet.” He unsheathed his sword and sloshed onward. As they approached the ship they could make out details in its construction. The railings were fashioned from leg bones lashed together, the mooring cleats were human pelvises. The lantern on the deck was, in fact, a human skull. Charlie wasn’t exactly sure how his powers as Luminatus were going to manifest themselves, but as they reached the hull of the ship he found himself very much wishing it would happen soon, and that levitation would be one of the powers.

“We’re fucked,” said Bob, looking up at the black hull curving above them.

“We’re not fucked,” Charlie said. “We just need someone to climb up there and throw us a rope.”

There was some milling around amid the squirrel people, then a lone figure stepped out of the little crowd—this one appeared to be a nineteenth-century French dandy with the head of a monitor lizard. His outfit—the ruffles and the coat—actually reminded Charlie of pictures that Lily had shown him of Charles Baudelaire.

“You can do it?” Charlie asked the lizard guy.

He held out his hands and lifted one foot out of the water. Squirrel paws. Charlie lifted the lizard guy as high as he could up to the hull, and the little creature caught ahold in the black wood, then scurried up the side of the ship and over the gunwale.

Minutes passed, and Charlie found himself listening hard for some hint as to what was going on above. When the thick rope splashed down next to him, he leapt two feet in the air and barely contained blasting out a full-blown man-scream.

“Nice,” said Bob.

“You first, then,” Charlie said, testing the rope to see if it would hold his weight. He waited until the bobcat guy was about three feet over his head before he tucked the sword-cane down inside the Lexan plate strapped over his back and started the climb himself. By the time he was three-quarters of the way up the rope, he felt as if his biceps were going to pop like water balloons and he entwined his motocross boot into the rope to rest. As if being granted a second wind by the gods, his biceps relaxed and when he resumed climbing he felt as if he might really be gaining his power as the Luminatus. When he reached the railing, he grabbed one of the bone mooring cleats and swung himself up until he sat straddling the rail.

He swung around and his headlamp caught the black shine in her eyes. She was holding the bobcat guy like an ear of corn, her claw driven through his skull, pinning his jaw shut. There was flesh and goo glowing dull red, running down her face and over her breasts as she tore another bite out of the Beefeater.

“Want some, lover?” she said. “Tastes like ham.”

At the breakfast bar in Charlie’s apartment, Lily said, “Shouldn’t we tell them?”

“They don’t all know about us. About this.” Minty held the date book. “Just Audrey.”

“Then shouldn’t we tell her?”

Minty looked at Audrey, who was sitting on the couch entwined in a sleepy pile with Charlie’s sister and one of the hellhounds, looking very content. “No, I don’t think that would serve any purpose right now.”

“He’s a good guy,” Lily said. She snatched a paper towel off the roll on the counter and dabbed her eyes before her mascara went raccoon on her again.

“I know,” Minty said. “He’s my friend.” As he said it, he felt a tug on his pant leg. He looked down to where Sophie was staring up at him.

“Hey, do you have a car?” she asked.

“Yes, I do, Sophie.”

“Can we go for a ride?”

Without any hesitation, Charlie whipped the sword-cane out of his back and snapped it down on the Morrigan’s wrist. She lost her grip on the bobcat guy, who bolted, screaming, across the deck and over the opposite railing. The Morrigan grabbed the sword-cane and tried to wrench it from Charlie’s grasp. He let her—pulled the sword free, then drove it into her solar plexus so hard that his fist connected with her ribs and the blade came out her back, sinking into the wooden hull of the lifeboat she was reclining against. For a split second his face was an inch from hers.

“Miss me?” she asked.

He rolled away just as she slashed at him. He got his forearm up just in time to deflect the blow away from his face, the thick Lexan plate on his forearm stopping the claws from taking off his hand. She lunged for him, but the sword kept her pinned to the boat. Charlie ran down the deck away from her as she screeched in anger.

He saw light coming from a door that must have led to the cabin at the aft of the ship—that same red glow—and he realized that it had to be coming from the soul vessels. Rachel’s soul could still be in there. He was only a step from the hatch when the giant raven dropped in front of him and spread her wings out across the deck, as if trying to block the whole end of the ship. He backpedaled and drew the Desert Eagle from the shoulder holster. He tried to hold it steady as he clicked off the safety. The Raven snapped at him and he leapt back. The beak then pulled back, changed, bubbled into the face of a woman—but the wings and talons remained in bird form.

“New Meat,” said Macha. “How brave of you to come here.”

Charlie pulled the trigger. Flame shot a foot out of the barrel and he felt as if someone had hit him in the palm with a hammer. He thought he had aimed right between her eyes, but the bullet had ripped through her neck, taking half of the black flesh with it. Her head lolled to the side and the raven body flailed its wings at him.

Charlie fell backward onto the deck, but pulled the pistol up and fired again as the raven was coming down on him. This one caught her in the center of the chest and sent her flying backward, up onto the cabin roof.

The ringing in his ears felt like someone had driven tuning forks into his head and hit them with drumsticks—a long, painful, high-pitched wail. He barely heard the shriek from his left as another Morrigan dropped out of the rigging behind him. He rolled to the railing and brought the gun up just as she slashed at his face. The gun and his forearm pad absorbed most of the blow, but the Desert Eagle was knocked from his grasp and slid down the deck.

Charlie did a somersault to his feet and ran after the gun. Nemain flicked her claws at his back and he heard the sizzle as the poison strafed the Lexan pad down his spine and burned onto the deck on either side of him. He dove for the pistol and tried to roll and come up with it pointed at his attacker, but he misjudged and came up with the back of his knees against the bone railing. She leapt, claws first, and hit him in the chest just as he fired the Desert Eagle and he was driven backward over the railing.

He hit flat on the water. The air exploded from his body and he felt like he’d been hit by a bus. He couldn’t breathe, but he could see, he could feel his limbs, and after a couple of seconds of gasping, he finally caught a breath.

“So, how’s it going so far?” asked the bobcat guy, about two feet from Charlie’s head.

“Good,” Charlie said. “They’re running scared.”

There was a big chunk bitten out of the middle of Bob’s torso, and his Beefeater uniform was in tatters, but otherwise he seemed in good spirits. He was holding the Desert Eagle cradled in his arms like a baby.

“You’ll likely need this. That last shot connected, by the way. You took off about half of her skull.”

“Good,” Charlie said, still having a little trouble catching his breath. He felt a searing pain in his chest and thought he might have broken a rib. He sat up and looked at his chest plate. The Morrigan’s claws had raked the front of it, but in one spot he could see where a claw had slipped under the plate and into his chest. He wasn’t bleeding badly, but he was bleeding, and it hurt like hell. “Are they still coming?”

“Not the two you shot. We don’t know where the one you stuck with your sword went.”

“I don’t know if I can make it up that rope again,” Charlie said.

“That may not be a _roblem,” Bob said. He was looking up to the ceiling of the grotto, where a whirlwind of squeaking bats was spiraling around the mast, but above them was beating the wings of another creature altogether.

Charlie took the pistol from Bob and climbed to his feet, nearly fell, then steadied himself and backed away from the hull of the ship. The squirrel people scattered around him. Bummer let loose with a fusillade of angry yapping.

The demon hit the water about thirty feet away. Charlie felt a scream rising in his throat but fought it down. The thing was nearly ten feet tall, with a wingspan of thirty feet. Its head was as big as a beer keg, and it appeared to have the shape and horns of a bull, except for the jaws, which were predatory, lined with teeth, like a cross between a shark and a lion. Its eyes were gleaming green.

“Soul stealer,” it growled. It folded its wings into two high points behind its back, and stepped toward Charlie.

“Well, that would be you, wouldn’t it?” Charlie said, a little breathless still. “I’m the Luminatus.”

The demon stopped. Charlie took the hesitation to bring up the pistol and fire. The shot took the demon high in the shoulder and spun him to the side. He turned back and roared.

Charlie could smell the creature’s breath, like rotting meat, wash over him. He backed up and fired again, his hand numb now from the recoil of the big pistol. The shot knocked the demon back a step. There was shrill cheering from above.

Charlie fired again and again. The slugs opened craters in the demon’s chest. He wavered, then fell to his knees. Charlie aimed and pulled the trigger again. The gun clicked.

Charlie backed up a few more steps and tried to remember what Minty had shown him about reloading. He managed to hit a button that released the clip from the pistol, which plopped into the water. Then he unsnapped one of the pouches under his arm to retrieve an extra clip. It slipped out and fell into the lake as well. Bob and a couple of the squirrel people splashed forward and started diving beneath the water, looking for the clip.

The demon roared again, unfurled his wings, and, in one great flap, pulled himself to his feet.

Charlie unsnapped the second clip and, with his hands shaking, managed to fit it into the bottom of the Desert Eagle. The demon crouched, as if to leap. Charlie jacked a shell into the chamber and fired at the same time. The demon fell forward as the huge slug took a chunk out of his thigh.

“Well done, Meat!” came a female voice from above.

Charlie looked up quickly, but then back to the bullheaded demon, who was on his feet again. Then he braced his wrist and fired, and again, walking forward, pumping bullets into the demon’s chest with each step, feeling any second as if his wrist would just shatter into pieces from the recoil, until the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. He stopped, just five feet away from the demon when it fell over, facefirst into the water. Charlie dropped the Desert Eagle and fell to his knees. The grotto seemed to be tilting before him, his vision tunneling down.

The Morrigan landed on three sides of him. Each had a glowing soul vessel in her claw and was rubbing it on her wounds.

“That was excellent, lover,” said the raven woman standing closest to the fallen demon. Charlie recognized her from the alley. The stab wound his sword had made in her stomach healed over as he watched. She kicked the bullheaded demon’s body. “See, I told you that guns suck.”

“That was well done, Meat,” said the one to Charlie’s right. Her neck was still knitting back together. She was the one he’d blasted up onto the cabin roof.

“You guys do bounce back with a certain Wile E. Coyote charm,” Charlie said. He grinned, feeling drunk now, like he was watching all this from another place.

“He’s so sweet,” said the hand-job harpy. “I could just eat him up.”

“Sounds good to me,” said the Morrigan to his left, whose head was still a little lopsided.

Charlie saw the venom dripping from her claws, then looked to the wound below his chest plate.

“Yes, darling,” said hand job, “I’m afraid Nemain did nick you. You really are quite the warrior to have lasted this long.”

“I’m the Luminatus,” Charlie said.

The Morrigan laughed, the one in front of Charlie did a little dance step. As she did, the bullheaded demon lifted his head from the water.

“I’m the Luminatus,” said the demon, black goo and water running between his teeth as he spoke.

The Morrigan stopped dancing, grabbed one of the demon’s horns, then pulled his head back. “You think?” she said. Then she plunged her claws into the demon’s throat. He rolled and threw her off, sending her sailing twenty feet in the air to smash into the hull of the ship.

The Morrigan behind Charlie patted his head as she passed. “We’ll be right with you, darling. I’m Macha, by the way, and we are the Luminatus—or we will be in a minute.”

The Morrigan fell on the bullheaded demon, taking great chunks of flesh and bone off his body with each slash of their talons. Two took to the air and swept in, taking swipes at the demon, who flailed at them, sometimes connecting, but too weakened from the gunshots to fight effectively. In two minutes it was finished, and most of the flesh had been flayed from it. Macha held his head by the horns like she was holding the handlebars of a motorcycle, even as the demon’s jaws continued to snap at the air.

“Your turn, soul stealer,” Macha said.

“Yeah, your turn,” said Nemain, baring her claws.

Macha held the demon head out in front of her, driving it at Charlie. He backed away as the teeth snapped inches from his face.

“Wait a minute,” said Babd.

The other two stopped and turned to their sister, who stood over what was left of the demon’s corpse. “We never got to finish.”

She took one step before something hit her like a ball of darkness, knocking her out of sight. Charlie looked at the demon head coming at him, then there was a loud smack and Macha was yanked to the side as if she’d had a bungee cord attached to her ankle.

The screeching started again and Charlie could see the Morrigan being whipped around in the darkness, splashing, and chaos—he couldn’t follow what was happening. His eyes wouldn’t focus.

He looked to Nemain, who was now coming at him with her claws dripping venom. A small hand appeared at the edge of his vision and the Morrigan’s head exploded into what looked like a thousand stars.

Charlie looked to where the hand had appeared before his eyes.

“Hi, Daddy,” Sophie said.

“Hi, baby,” Charlie said.

Now he could see what was happening—the hellhounds were tearing at the Morrigan. One of them broke, jumped into the air and unfurled her wings, then dove at Sophie, screeching.

Sophie raised her hand as if she was waving bye-bye and the Morrigan vaporized into a spray of black goo. The souls, thousands of them, that she had consumed over the millennia, floated into the air, red lights that circled the grotto, making the whole huge chamber appear to have been frozen in the middle of a fireworks display.

“You shouldn’t be here, honey,” Charlie said.

“Yes, I should,” Sophie said. “I had to fix this, send them all back. I’m the Luminatus.”

“You…”

“Yeah,” she said matter-of-factly, in that Master of All Death and Darkness voice that is so irritating in a six-year-old.

The hellhounds were both on the remaining Morrigan now, tearing her in half as Charlie watched.

“No, honey,” Charlie said.

Sophie raised her hand and Babd was vaporized like the others—the captured souls rose like embers from a bonfire.

“Let’s go home, Daddy,” Sophie said.

“No,” Charlie said, barely able to hold up his head. “We have something we have to get.” He lurched forward and one of the hellhounds was there to brace him. The whole army of squirrel people was coming around the bow of the ship, each carrying a glowing soul vessel he’d retrieved from the ship’s cabin.

“Is this it?” Sophie said. She took a CD from Bob and handed it to Charlie.

He turned it in his hands and hugged it to his chest. “You know what this is, honey?”

“Yeah. Let’s go home, Daddy.”

Charlie fell over the back of Alvin. Sophie and the squirrel people steadied him until they were out of the Underworld.

Minty Fresh carried Charlie to the car.

A doctor had come and gone. When Charlie came to he was on his bed at home and Audrey was wiping his forehead with a damp cloth.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” Audrey said.

“Did Sophie tell you?”

“Yeah.”

“They grow up so fast,” Charlie said.

“Yeah.” Audrey smiled.

“I got this.” He reached behind his chest plate and pulled out the Sarah McLachlan CD that pulsated with red light.

Audrey nodded and reached out for the disc. “Let’s put that over here where you can keep an eye on it.” As soon as her fingers touched the plastic case the light went out and Audrey shuddered. “Oh my,” she said.

“Audrey.” Charlie tried to sit up, but was forced back down by the pain. “Ouch. Audrey, what happened? Did they get it? Did they take her soul?”

She was looking at her chest, then looked up at Charlie, tears in her eyes. “No, Charlie, it’s me,” she said.

“But you had touched that before, that night in the pantry. Why didn’t it happen then?”

“I guess I wasn’t ready then.”

Charlie took her hand and squeezed it, then squeezed it much harder than he intended as a wave of pain washed through him. “Goddammit,” he said. He was panting now, breathing like he might hyperventilate.

“I thought it was all dark, Audrey. All the spiritual stuff was spooky. You made me see.”

“I’m glad,” Audrey said.

“Makes me think I should have slept with a poet so I could have understood the way the world can be distilled into words.”

“Yes. I think you have the soul of a poet, Charlie.”

“I should have made love with a painter, too, so I could feel the wave of a brushstroke, so I could absorb her colors and textures and really see.”

“Yes,” Audrey said, brushing at his hair with her fingers. “You have such a wonderful imagination.”

“I think,” said Charlie, his voice going higher as he breathed harder, “I should have bedded a scientist so I would understand the mechanics of the world, felt them right down to my spine.”

“Yes, so you could feel the world,” Audrey said.

“With big tits,” Charlie added, his back arching in pain.

“Of course, baby,” Audrey said.

“I love you, Audrey.”

“I know, Charlie. I love you, too.”

Then Charlie Asher, Beta Male, husband to Rachel, brother to Jane, father to Sophie (the Luminatus, who held dominion over Death), beloved of Audrey, Death Merchant and purveyor of fine vintage clothing and accessories, took his last breath, and died.

Audrey looked up to see Sophie come into the room. “He’s gone, Sophie.”

Sophie put her hand on Charlie’s forehead. “Bye, Daddy,” she said.