She starts to reach for the heart and stops.
“You spent it all?”
“Remember when there was that other me running around the city?”
“Yes. The Mouseketeer.”
“He gave most of it away.”
She leans back in her seat, knuckling her upper lip, trying to cover a laugh.
“How awful for you. Betrayed by your own doppelgänger. Does that make him the evil twin or you?”
“Ask me when I have to rob a gas station to buy a cup of coffee. I’m living off bribes from gangs and ne’er-do-wells. Did you know that people will pay you cash money not to kill them?”
“We usually get the opposite. ‘I’ll give you my fortune if only you’ll make me immortal.’ ”
“You ever take them up on it?”
“Rarely. Most people who come around begging for it, they’re not the type you want hanging around for the next thousand years.”
“I don’t know if I want to hang around with anyone for a thousand years. Present company excepted, of course.”
She nods at my weak compliment and pours a shot of blood from the heart flask. The stopper in the aorta has a man’s face. I wonder if all the stoppers have the same face or it’s a likeness of the poor slob that donated the organ.
The waiter comes back with my whiskey. Before I sip it, I say, “I assume there’s no blood in this.”
Tykho shakes her head.
“It’s as clean as a virgin’s pussy.”
I raise the glass in a toast and take a sip. Whatever brand it is, it’s smooth and burns just right. I know instinctively it’s nothing I can afford, but I bet the Chateau has some in stock. I’ll have to find out the name.
“Sorry about Phil. Your little ones play hard. I didn’t know we were just roughhousing until it was too late.”
“Yes. They’re all in a time-out. Seeing how Phil is the first Aeternus you’ve killed since poor little Eleanor Vance, I think we can just chalk it up to bad luck and not a break in our truce.”
Eleanor Vance. I try not to think about her. She’s one of the few kills, and definitely the only shroud-eater kill, I regret. She was a teenybopper turned bloodsucker, young and still dumb enough to be reckless. I killed her for the Golden Vigil. I’ll never forgive Marshal Wells and Aelita for sending me after her.
“I wish I could take back Eleanor.”
Tykho runs a dyed-blue fingertip around the rim of her glass.
“It’s the curse of being a predator with a brain. Creatures like you and me, we’re supposed to kill and move on. We’re not supposed to reflect on it. I’d say it’s proof there’s no God, but I know you’d disagree.”
“He’s around. He just has a really fucked-up sense of humor.”
Or it’s another of his screwups. She’s right about predators. Wolves don’t weep when they take down a deer. And don’t tell me regret is all about having a soul. Everybody has regrets, but most people use their souls about as often as they floss, which is usually two days before they go to the dentist.
“Let’s get down to it, shall we?” says Tykho. “I didn’t invite you here to give you money, but despite last night’s unpleasantness, I do have something for you.”
“All right.”
“It’s about the thing you’re looking for. The Qom something?”
“Magic 8 Ball is okay.”
“I know you were getting nowhere finding it, so you started your blitzkrieg through the city. It unsettled everyone and made our hunting harder, so we made our own inquiries using our own methods.”
I don’t want to think about what their methods means.
“And?”
“We think we’ve found something.” She takes a sip of her blood cocktail and goes on. “Your mistake was thinking all the answers lie in threatening the living. We have connections with a lot of L.A.’s nonliving residents.”
“It’s hard to punch a ghost.”
“Lucky ghosts.”
“So, a dead person told you where to find the 8 Ball.”
“A friend of yours, I think. Cherry Moon?”
Cherry is one of the people I came back from Hell to kill, only I didn’t have to. Another old friend, Parker, got to her first. Then I killed Parker. I tried to help out Cherry after she died. Tried to convince her ghost to cross over. No way she’s going to Heaven, but an eternity in limbo has got to be worse than Hell.
“That’s too bad. I’d hoped Cherry would have moved on by now.”
Tykho holds up a finger.
“Was that your suggestion? It seems that she was considering that very thing and talking it over with another ghost. A very old one and a bit mad, according to her, though I’m not sure Cherry is the best judge of crazy. Anyway, she had almost decided to cross over with this odd ghost when he changed his mind at the last minute. She said he claimed to be guarding a great treasure, something both Heaven and Hell would kill to get their hands on and that he couldn’t desert it.”
“Did she see it? Does she know where it is?”
“Calm down, cowboy. You people always want to cut to the chase. Let me drink my drink.”
By “you people” she means mortals. People with a clock ticking and a death sentence hanging over their heads. Immortals love to play this game. And this is also me paying for Phil. Tykho might not send a hit squad after me, but now that she’s got me hooked, she’s going to take her time giving me what I want.
Above the dance floor, boys dance with boys in one go-go cage and a bunch of girls dance together in another. They’re all wearing black vests and have shaved heads. It only takes a second to see why. Invitation to a Gunfighter is playing on flat-screens all over the bar. I have a feeling the movie is a hit less because it’s a decent studio western and more because Yul Brynner looks so good in his bad-guy black hat and vest.
Tykho finishes her drink and wipes her blue lips with a napkin.
“Where was I? Yes. The crazy ghost. He started to take her to it. They got as far as his haunt when he got cold feet. He even had a little breakdown, according to Cherry. He’s supposed to be guarding some Holy Grail–like thing and here he was about to give it up to a pretty face.”
“Can Cherry take me there?”
Tykho shakes her head.
“No. He scared her too much. But she told me where his haunt is. And that he’s guarding the thing for an angel. You’re part angel, I hear. Maybe you could talk him out of it.”
I’m going to shit monkeys if Tykho drags this out much longer.
“Where’s the ghost?”
She smiles. She’s going to drag it out.
“Kill City.”
Now I wish she’d dragged it out a little longer.
“Is she sure?”
“How many Kill Cities are there?”
“One too many for me.”
“Is the great Stark afraid of a dead shopping mall?”
I finish my whiskey.
“As a matter of fact I’m terrified of shopping malls. If you’d been to Hell, you would be too. All the cute little trinket stores. Fish-eyed mannequins and ladies squirting perfume in your face. Designer toilet seats and chakra-adjusting easy chairs. It’s all so fucking pointless. People using money to run out the clock, trying to find something to occupy their time before they die. It’s exactly like Hell.”
I signal to the waiter for another drink.
“We all have our weaknesses,” says Tykho. “For us, it’s daylight. For you, it’s Cinnabon.”
“Damn. That little girl ghost about killed me last month. I hoped I was done with ghosts for a while.”
This just gets worse and worse. On top of everything else, Kill City is all the way out in Santa Monica. All those tanned tourists might be fun for bloodsuckers, but the stink of SPF 90 sends me into cardiac arrest.
“There’s something else.”
“Good. I was hoping this could get worse.”
“We’re not the only ones who know about the ghost. Don’t bother asking who the other party is because I don’t know, but we have every reason to believe that they’re going after your 8 Ball too.”
“That’s all I need.”