Gan knew humans were different. Their rules were all tied up with them having souls, and what demon could make sense of that? They even got together in groups to agree on the rules sometimes—that was called democracy—and they got really worked up about owning things. They had lots and lots of rules about ownership, even more than about sex. They fought wars over it, but ownership had nothing to do with who could eat who because they didn’t eat each other. No, they ate dead things instead, and said thou shalt not kill but killed anyway.
But that was because they didn’t have to do what their rules said. As long as they didn’t get caught, they could break as many rules as they wanted, which was why Earth was usually such fun.
Not this time. It sighed and thumbed the remote again.
“Quit playing with that thing,” Harlowe said testily. “You’re distracting me.”
It looked at the man in the other bed in what was called a motel room. Motel rooms were very boring, but Harlowe was being hunted, so he had to hide out. Gan could understand that—it had to sneak around, too, because the humans would hunt it if they knew it was here. But that could be fun, too.
Not in a motel room. When they stayed at the other hiding place, with the Dozens, Gan had a pretty good time. It wasn’t allowed to show itself, but it could play tricks, watch the others talk and fight and fuck, that sort of thing. Sometimes it got to steal stuff. The gang thought very highly of stealing, though of course they didn’t know Gan was the one getting the money and guns. They thought Harlowe did everything.
But in a motel room, all it could do was watch TV. It sighed and pushed the channel change button again.
“Quit that,” Harlowe snapped.
Harlowe sure wasn’t any fun. The human wasn’t killing right now, so he was planning. He had papers spread out all over the bed. “I can’t find the fucking channel,” it explained.
“Which fucking channel? There’s a hundred of them!”
Gan brightened. “A hundred? That’s a lot of fucking.”
“Stupid little pervert. Not a hundred channels about fucking. A hundred fucking channels.”
Gan’s forehead wrinkled. “That doesn’t make sense.” One of the difficult things about Earth was that you couldn’t hear meanings here, only words.
But Harlowe had lost interest and was studying his papers once more, muttering to himself. “Needs to be half again as big…”
Gan went back to channel surfing—cute turn of phrase, that. Humans were very inventive with language because they got all their meaning from words.
Still no fucking, but there was shooting. Was it a war? Gan’s ears perked up. It was very curious about how humans conducted their wars. “… circle the wagons,” the TV person cried. “Hurry! They’re almost here!”
“… still, if I got rid of the desk,” Harlowe muttered, “the throne could go by the windows. What will I need with a desk, anyway?”
Gan tried to figure out what was happening on TV. Two groups of humans were shooting at each other. One group rode horses; the other didn’t. The bunch on horses yelled a lot and seemed to be winning. Some of them had guns; some had bows and arrows.
Then two more people on horses rode up, guns blazing. Many of the other horse people fell off, dead, and the rest scattered. Then the other group was happy.
“Can’t do it all overnight.” Harlowe sounded crisp, satisfied. “The Oval Office will do for a throne room initially. Later, I can have the Capitol Building remodeled.”
“Who was that masked man?” a TV woman asked one of the TV men.
The shooting was over, so Gan changed the channel. Things would get better soon, it reminded itself. Just last night Xitil had used Gan’s hand to write some instructions for Harlowe—instructions that came from Her.
Gan had done its part. It had brought Lily Yu to Dis and drunk a little blood—and oh my, but that had been good! Fizzy and powerful… but not powerful enough to let it possess her. Not without help from Her, only She couldn’t act directly. That would break the pact.
So She had to work through a tool. Once Harlowe did like he was supposed to do, Gan could get inside Lily Yu. Then it could have lots of fun.
But it wondered, as it watched a TV man cooking— that’s what humans did to dead things before eating them—if Xitil knew that her new associate’s tool was stark, staring crazy.
THIRTEEN
“THERE are three pictures he didn’t send us. Three victims he didn’t want us to know about.”
“We can’t be sure of that.”
Lily cast an impatient glance over her shoulder. Baxter sat at his desk, a scuffed and scarred relic from the fifties that looked out of place in the modern building that housed the FBI’s field office in San Diego. It held a jumble of file folders, a computer, five empty Dr. Pepper cans, and the one he’d just opened.
The man had a serious soda habit. “He killed on the twenty-fifth, the twenty-seventh, the twenty-ninth. No picture of a victim dated the thirty-first, but we’ve got one for the second and fourth of this month, then nothing on the sixth and eighth. Another victim on the tenth, and now Curtis on the twelfth. What does that say to you?”
“That we have a pattern. That doesn’t mean he killed on the missing dates. Something could have interfered with him on those days. Maybe he didn’t find the right type.”
“He does have a type.” She stopped in front of the murder board. There were seven prints pinned to it. Seven photos of women, all of them with light brown hair, all young, all naked. Five lay in beds, like Kim Curtis. One was in an alley, while one stared blindly up into the branches of a tree. None bore any marks of violence.
Seven tidy dead people, hands folded primly on their breasts.
“Why leave us pictures?” she asked. “Why make it easier for us to track him?”
“We haven’t found him yet,” Baxter pointed out. “But yeah, I know what you mean. He handed us a lot of information with those photos.”
They’d beer, taken by a digital camera, which meant the images had data attached. He’d made the disk at Kinko’s, for God’s sake. “We know what camera he used and when he took each of the pictures. We’ve got names and places of death for three of them now—damn Leung’s eyes.”
“I can’t blame him for not realizing the other vie in his territory was a homicide,” Baxter said. “You get a dead hooker, no signs of violence, you don’t say, ‘Hey, I’ll bet some dude with a magic staff sucked the life out of her.’”
“Once Curtis turned up in the same shape, arranged the same way, he knew he’d been wrong about Cynthia Porter. He held back on us until his chief leaned on him.”
“You’ll find that locals do that a lot.”
She exchanged glances with the older man. Baxter knew she’d been one of the locals until very recently. “I didn’t,” she said evenly.
He shrugged.
She and Baxter hadn’t exactly butted heads. MCD’s jurisdiction was clear, and Baxter had put several people at her disposal without complaint. But he’d made it plain he thought her too young and inexperienced to have charge of an investigation of this size.
Lily tended to agree. She wanted Karonski back. She’d told Ruben that when she reported on the increased scope of the investigation. But the imp outbreak was getting worse. There’s been a rash of fires, several accidents, and now a few fatalities. The governor of Virginia was talking about closing businesses, and the outbreak was being touted as the largest in a century. Ruben couldn’t spare Karonski until they located and closed the leak.