Flesh Circus

“Oh goddammit,” I yelled, and yanked the cup back, tossed it into my left hand, and jabbed the right one forward. Eva let out a short blurting cry as the fire ate into dry wood—he had his altar sitting on fruit crates, for God’s sake.

Smoke billowed. Etheric force pooled in my palm, and the sudden blast of heat against my face stung both smart and dumb eyes. “Fuck!” I yelled, and snapped my right hand back hard, the scar singing a piercing agonized note into the meat of my arm as I yanked.

The flames died with a whoosh, all available oxygen sucked away. I backed off in a hurry.

“Jill?” Eva sounded about ten years old, and scared. Of course, producing flame is one of those things that tells a regular exorcist to call me in a hurry, but we weren’t dealing with Hell here.

Or at least, we weren’t dealing solely with Hell.

Huh. “Everything’s cool, Eva.” The cup was a big chunk, and my pockets were on the full side already. But I now had a good idea where I could go to find out more about all this. “We’re going to clean up here, then I want you to go check on something for me, and I’m going to do more digging.”

“More digging? Do I even want to know?”

Smart girl. “Probably not. I have to go out and visit the bitch of Greenlea.”

“Great. I’ll just let you do that, then. What am I checking on?”

“You’re going to call Avery and check on another victim.” One that we’ve got in the bag, thank God.

Greenlea is just north of downtown, in the shopping district. If you’re really looking, you can sometimes catch a glimpse of the granite Jesus on top of Sisters of Mercy, glowering at the financial district. But Greenlea’s organic froufrou boutiques and pretty little restaurants don’t like seeing it. Sometimes I think it’s an act of will that keeps that particular landmark obscured from certain places in the city, especially around downtown.

Saul waited until I set the parking brake. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” I peered out the window, sca

This district is just one street, with two high-end bookstores, vegan eateries, a coffee shop, and a couple of kitchy-klatch places selling overpriced junk. A few antique stores cluster down at one end, and a fancy bakery and two pricey bars at the other. It’s the kind of well-fed, quiet little upwardly mobile granola enclave you can find in pretty much any American city. Sometimes you can find two or three of them in the same metropolis.

Two blocks off the main avenue—Greenlea itself—the crackerbox houses are pushed together behind their neat little gardens. They’re old houses, on prime property, and people who have an address out here are jealously proud of it.

On the corner of Eighth and Vine, two and a half blocks away, is Sunshine Samedi. I’m sure some of the trendoid yuppies think it’s a Buddhist term, too.

“He got away.” Saul’s face was shadowed in the half-light. “I thought—”

I didn’t want him to keep going with that particular mental train. “Don’t worry about it. He didn’t come downstairs, right? We didn’t have to peel him off Eva, and we’ll find him soon enough.”

“Still.” He even sounded upset. I glanced at him. He looked haggard in the half-light, and I wished I had time to sit him down for a good talking-to. Only what would I say?

“Don’t, Saul. You’re my partner, and a good one. You did fine.” Did he really think I was going to yell at him for being concerned because I’d been knocked right through the ceiling?

But it wasn’t like him. He was my partner, and he knew better. Whatever knocked me sideways wouldn’t put me out of commission; I was just too tough and nasty. He should have stayed where I put him.

But maybe he wasn’t able to. Like he’s not able to touch you anymore without flinching.

I looked away and unlocked my door, hoping he couldn’t read my expression. “Come on, let’s go see if she’s in.”

Of course she’d be in. She never left the house.

A little coffee-shop and bakery with carefully watered nasturtiums in the window boxes sat in a brackish well of etheric depression, congested like a bruise. It wasn’t the congestion of Hell, but it was thick and smelled rancid—not truly smelled, but more sensed with that place in the very back of the sinuses where instinct lives. The closest I can figure is that the brain has no other way of decoding the information it’s being handed, so it dredges up smells out of memory and serves them up.

In any case, it was more than strongly fermented here, just on the edge of turning bad. Etherically speaking.

The coffee here was horrible and the baked goods substandard, but that wasn’t why people came. It most definitely was not why the place was still open, especially in a neighborhood where people were picky about their shade-grown espresso and organic-flour croissants.

Chalked signs writhed over cracked concrete, a ribbon of walkway and a naked patio holding only a terra-cotta fire-dish and chimney on three squat legs. To get back here, you had to lift the iron latch on a high board gate and wriggle past some thorny sweet acacia that hadn’t been cut back. The smell cloyed in the nose, curdled and slipped down the throat, and I gapped my mouth a little bit to breathe through it. I’m sure Lorelei left the acacia there deliberately, and coaxed it into growing large enough to pick people’s pockets—or rend their flesh.

The backyard was cool, holding only a ghost of the day’s heat. There was no moon, and the porch light buzzed a little, illuminating nothing. The garden pressed close, far too humid for the desert.

Her water bill must be sky-high, I thought, just like I did every time I came here. Which wasn’t often. Once every three years or so is often enough for me to keep tabs on the bitch of Greenlea, as Mikhail often called her. Lorelei kept her nose clean and wasn’t directly responsible for any murders, so all things considered she was a minor irritant in a city filled with major ones.

I wish prioritizations like that weren’t daily occurrences.

“Smells bad.” The words were just a breath of sound. Saul wrinkled his nose.

I nodded. This spider has the bad business in this whole neighborhood and a few others coming to her door. And I’m sure she helps it out quite a bit. “Lot of people around here like to double-deal their neighbors. They come here for help.”

“Hanging around with you always an—” He stopped short, his sleek silver-starred head coming up in a quick, inquiring movement. He looked more catlike than ever when he did that.

I heard it too. A skittering, like tiny insect feet.

Oh, shit. My left hand closed around the whip handle, my right touched a gun butt. Saul dropped back, melding into the shadows, and I listened intently. The scar turned hot and hard, and I wished I had a spare leather cuff. Still, superhuman hearing is far from the worst ally in a situation like this.

Skittering paused. The scar turned hot and flushed, a hard knot of corruption snugged into my flesh.

A small creak sounded from the hinges as a random breeze wandered through the garden.

The back door was slightly open.

Motherfuck. I eased forward, the gun slipping out of its holster and into my hand like a lover’s fingers. The garden behind me exhaled, and I caught a thread of another scent, fresh and coppery under the reek of the acacia. What the—

I toed the door open, the hinges giving out a loose moan. Shadows fled aside, dim light spilling across yellow linoleum. Ru

“Oh, fuck.”

“What is it?” Saul, behind me.

“Lorelei’s dead,” I informed him grimly. “And I think—”

Whatever I thought was cut off as a living carpet of shining, multilegged things scuttled and swarmed from the gloom, their backs marked with pinpricks of red laser light, and raced toward me. It was a wave of black cockroaches, and the skittering of their tiny feet stabbed my ears as my smart eye pierced the etheric veil over them, catching a glimpse of a swirling, ugly intent.