“Yeah, but you still won’t have a skull. Your head’s going to look like a jack-o’-lantern a week after Halloween.”
He shakes his head in mock sorrow.
“I’m afraid under the circumstances I can’t allow you to see the Augur. And I’m forwarding your name to the local police watch list.”
“Do it. What are there, like a hundred cops left in L.A.? And they don’t want to be out in the rain any more than you do.”
“Maybe I won’t have to do anything if you turn this circus act of yours around and go home.”
“I’d love to, but I have an invitation from Blackburn himself.”
I reach into my pocket and Ishii’s crew goes rigid. With my fingertips, I slowly pull out Blackburn’s note and hand it to Ishii. He looks it over and crumples it up. Tosses it into a puddle.
“With your criminal associations it’s probably a forgery. Go home, Stark, before you fall on a bullet.”
Ishii’s phone rings. He has to fumble under his trash bag to pull it from inside his tattered coat. He puts it to his ear and listens intently for a few seconds.
“Yes, sir. He’s here now, but he’s not behaving rationally. He’s made threats.”
Ishii listens.
“No. Not to you personally, but this is a highly unstable individual, with a history of violence. As head of security, I have to take these things seriously.”
He abruptly stops talking.
“Yes, sir. No, sir. I understand.”
He purses his lips as he fumbles the phone back into his coat. Waves his arm in my direction.
“Let him through, boys.”
His crew gets out of the way so I can roll the bike to the curb and heel down the kickstand.
Getting off, I say, “Your problem, Ishii, is that you like playing protector of the realm for the Augur because it gives you a power hard-on. But you really don’t respect the man. I mean, he peeks into the future. He probably knew exactly what you were going to do before you did. The only reason he waited this long to do anything about it is he wanted to give you a chance to pull your head out of your ass.”
Ishii looks at his watch, waves his people back to their posts. He doesn’t want to look at me.
“Stop talking, Stark. And go inside before my gun goes off by accident.”
“Have fun with the fishes, Noah.”
The door is open for me when I reach the hotel.
The outside of Blackburn’s house might be a wreck, but the inside is something else. The inner sanctum is a Victorian fever dream of potted palms, gaslights, silk settees, and arsenic-green walls. You half expect to see Dickens and Queen Victoria sipping laudanum in the living room. I know the layout, so I stroll through the place to the parlor, where Blackburn has his office.
The Augur is a scryer. A seer. All Augurs are scryers and Blackburn is supposed to be a good one. He’s an okay guy in an executive kind of way. His suit looks like it was cut by God’s tailor. His graying temples make him look like he’s in his late forties, but I know that he’s well over a hundred. The rich are different. He comes around from his desk and puts out his hand. I shake it.
“Thank you for coming,” he says, and gestures to a chair before going back to the iron throne.
“I don’t know why I’m here, so I’ll say ‘you’re welcome.’ For the moment.”
Blackburn’s heart beats faster than a powerful politician’s heart ought to. He’s nervous, but good at not showing it. He picks up a pen and sets it at a right angle to his papers.
“I asked you here in hopes of clearing up any differences there might be between us. In times like this, I don’t want us to be enemies.”
“I didn’t know we were enemies.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No. I don’t. I saved your wife’s soul and got treated like a rabid dog.”
“You did break in here and terrorize my guests during your time as Lucifer.”
“I was just back from Hell and having a bad day.”
“You have a lot of those,” he says.
“You try coming back from Hell feeling springtime fresh.”
Blackburn pours himself a drink of something brown and whiskey-smelling from a crystal decanter. Holds up the bottle toward me and raises his eyebrows.
“Sure,” I say, figuring he has easier ways of killing me than poison. I take a sip and it takes me a minute to recognize it. A kind of rye called Angel’s Envy. There are whiskey-colored wings on the bottle and everything. The stuff is aged in rum barrels and has about twelve different tastes going down. It’s not Aqua Regia, but it will do.
I say, “Nasrudin Hodja sent a car full of punks after me a while back. They shot up the street and nearly killed a friend of mine. Were you in on that?”
He sets down his drink.
“No. I give you my word.”
His heartbeat doesn’t change. He’s not sweating. He’s telling the truth.
Tuatha Fortune, his wife, comes in. Perches on the edge of Blackburn’s desk. She’s in a white silk blouse and black pants. Old-money modest.
“He’s not lying,” she says. “I was there during the discussion.”
“He didn’t try to have me killed. He just talked about it. I’m all relieved now.”
“Nasrudin came to me and asked permission to right the insult after you tortured his nephews in that bar.”
A few weeks back, while looking for the Qomrama, I hassled some Cold Case soul merchants at Bamboo House of Dolls. Stripped them and made them think I was skinning one of them. It was just a spell, a Hellion hoodoo trick. Nothing bad happened except to their egos. Some people can’t take a joke.
“I didn’t torture anyone. They were as safe as baby chickens under mom’s wings. I scared them a little and sent them to bed without their supper. That’s it.”
Blackburn pours his wife a drink. It’s a little early in the day for whiskey, even for me. They really don’t like having me in their house.
I hardly know Tuatha at all. When I first met her she wasn’t much more than a walking corpse. I thought she might be on chemotherapy, but why would a high-class Sub Rosa be using civilian doctors? Turns out Aelita had hidden her soul somewhere in order to blackmail Blackburn. I convinced Mr. Muninn to find it and return it to her. However much she might be one of L.A.’s pampered rich elite, she didn’t deserve to get ripped apart by a lunatic like Aelita.
“You have a madcap definition of safe, Mr. Stark,” she says.
I raise my drink in her direction.
“It’s just Stark. And yeah, I’m all about the merry pranks.”
“Physical torture or not,” says Blackburn, “Nasrudin took what you did as an attack on the entire soul-merchant clan. He demanded satisfaction and I didn’t have any choice but to say yes. It was politics, pure and simple. As an ex-Lucifer, surely you understand that.”
Tuatha says, “Don’t tell me you didn’t see it coming. You understand revenge, if nothing else.”
“I understand fine. I just get testy when it’s aimed at me.”
Blackburn waves his hand, dismissing everything that’s been said.
“Let’s put that behind us. I’ve made it clear to Nasrudin that he overstepped when he tried to gun you down. It won’t happen again.”
“And he’s such a reasonable guy. I’m sure he keeps his promises.”
“To me he does.”
I can believe that, actually. Sounds like I’m clear of one source of immense bullshit for a while.
Tuatha says, “You know, you did a lot of people a lot of good when you dispatched Norris Quay. I can tell you truthfully, he won’t be missed.”
Old, decrepit Norris Quay was the richest man in California, but not anymore. He’s severely dead.
“I bet. But I didn’t dispatch him. He was killed by crazies in the basement of Kill City.”
“Naturally,” says Blackburn, humoring me but not believing a word of it. He opens a desk drawer and pulls out an old book. It’s battered, like one of the heretical books in Father Traven’s library.
“However it happened, it’s given us access to his considerable collection of occult objects and texts. My great-grandfather wrote this one. One of the first set of bylaws and family trees for the American Sub Rosa. Would you like to see it?”