Skin Trade

Davey gri

“What’s your percentage?”

“Eighty.”

“Seventy,” Rocco said.

“Still, in a pinch, nifty.”

He gri

I was happy for him, and seventy percent success was good for some of the rarer talents, but frankly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go up against a giant that could rip apart someone in body armor, or cut someone to pieces with a whirlwind of blades. Seventy percent sounded like good odds until it was your life on the line; then not so good. But frankly, what else did we have? Then I realized I was being stupid. I knew that the practitioner who had died had had a spell that Vittorio had feared.

I started searching my phone for Phoebe Billings’s number. If her coven member knew the spell, then chances were that as his high priestess, so would she, and I was standing with two other practitioners. If we could all learn it, we had a chance.

71

I WAS SITTING in the passenger seat of Rocco’s car when I got a glimpse of something. I thought at first I’d seen it out the window in the bright Vegas sun, but then it moved across my vision again, and I realized it was in my head.

“I’m seeing things,” I said, out loud.

“What kind of things?” Rocco asked. Davey leaned forward on the backseat. It was a good question; I didn’t have a good answer.

“I don’t know; it’s gone now, but it was bright.”

“Tell us when and what you see.”

“Will do.” I was secretly hoping not to see anything else, but it was just nice to be working with police who didn’t think I was crazy for being psychic.

My phone rang, and it was Phoebe Billings returning my message. She started with, “No police have come to my door. You didn’t involve me and my group.”

“Didn’t see a purpose to it, but I found out what killed Randy, and what he was doing when he died.” I explained.

“Ji

“Honest.”

“Wait a minute, and I’ll look it up. I know the spell you mean, but it’s very old, and it’s in a book here. Randy was always very into the history of our craft. I remember a night that we talked about the ji

“No.”

“Randy did; it was one of his specialties in the army. Does anyone else on the SWAT team speak Arabic?”

I asked that out loud to the others.

“Moon does, but then his mother’s family is from Iran,” Davey said.

“I can read it,” Rocco said, “and Moon says my pronounciation is okay.”

I handed the phone to him, and Phoebe repeated the spell to him. He repeated it back, and it made the hair on my arms stand up, like in my dream. “She wants you to write the spell down.”

“I can’t write Arabic.”

“Just write it as she tells you, one letter at a time. She’s going to try to give it to you the way it’s pronounced. She wants to see if saying it without knowing what it means will still work.”

“Oh, like a real magic word, that has power even if you speak it by accident,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Those are really rare,” Davey said. “Most spells don’t work at all without some power behind them.”

I was letting Phoebe dictate letters to me, one at a time. It didn’t make any more sense made into mock English than it did in Arabic, but I was willing to try. When I had it all, I repeated it back to her.

“Now, read it faster,” she said.

I read it faster. There was no tingle; it was just noise.

“Tell me what it’s supposed to do,” I said.

“It sends them back through Solomon’s shield. It traps them outside our reality again.”

“It’s a banishing spell, like for a demon.”

“Yes, that will do.”

I tried again; thinking what it was supposed to do, I put intent into the sounds that were supposed to be words, and it still didn’t work for me. I handed the notes to Davey, and again there was that hair-raising energy. “I think you’re not pronouncing here and here right,” he said.

I kept practicing as we drove, hard and fast, trying to catch up with everyone. We had Davey, and we had a spell. Guns wouldn’t stop these things.

“Call Moon,” Rocco said, “give him the words. He’ll know how to pronounce it.”

Davey made the call.

I asked Rocco, as he screeched around a corner and I clutched the door, “What made you learn to read Arabic?”

“I wanted to be able to read the Qur’an and the Bible for myself without translators messing with it. Most people don’t realize that some of the original books of the Bible were written in Aramaic.”

“I knew that, but I don’t read it.”

“I also read ancient Greek for the same reason.”

“You must be a heavy churchgoer,” I said.

“Every Sunday, unless I’m on a call.”

I smiled at him. “Me, too,” I said.

“I’m Lutheran, what are you?”

“Episcopalian.”

He wasted a smile on me. “Fat Henry’s church.”

“Hey, I know my Church history, and I’m okay with it.”

“As long as you know, it’s cool.”

“Yeah, my church exists because Fat Henry couldn’t get a divorce as a Catholic.”

I heard Davey repeat the syllables over the phone. It danced down my spine. “Wizard died trying to say those words,” Rocco said.

“Yes, he did.”

“This one’s for Wizard.”

“For Wizard,” I said, and though I’d never met him alive, I meant it. Of course, I had the weretiger who had cut him up in my room, but he was as i

72

WE MISSED THE party. There were three dead human servants lying on the ground with their hands and feet shackled. You shackle everyone, even the dead, just in case. It’s SOP. Edward, Olaf, and Bernardo came out with more blood on them than on the other operators. But then it’s a bitch to put the coveralls over all the weapons, so you get blowback. Olaf had the most blood on him.

Bernardo said, as he walked past me, “He staked his vampires, and defucking-capitated them. Ted and I shot ours.” He kept walking, as if he didn’t want to be around Olaf right that moment.

Edward said, “Vittorio wasn’t there, Anita. There’s a coffin that’s empty, but he’s not there.”

“Shit!” I got another glimpse of something. I saw someone in white, kneeling.

Edward grabbed my arm. “Anita?”

“Did you have another vision?” Rocco asked.

“Someone in white, kneeling. I’m tall, much taller than I am. I’m seeing through someone else’s eyes, I think.”

“Who?”

“Vittorio,” Edward said.

“What?” Rocco said.

“He messed with you, right? He wants you to be his human servant.”

“Yeah.”

“You know how it is when a vamp messes with you, Anita. The more they play, the more likely you are to acquire their powers, at least temporarily.”

“Yeah, she did that with me,” Rocco said.

Either Edward didn’t catch that the sergeant had implied he was a vampire, or it didn’t matter to him. “Concentrate, Anita, try to see it.”

I closed my eyes and thought about Vittorio. I thought about the look of his face, the depth of the scars on his chest and stomach. The world wavered, and I was looking at Bibiana, chained and gagged on the floor, beside a bed. Vittorio turned his head, and Max was tied spread-eagled on that bed, covered in holy objects. The bed was red velvet and huge. I knew that bed. I knew where they were. I fought not to be excited but to be calm. I fought to break away, without him knowing.