Classics Mutilated Part 26

She said, "Maybe I can help."

"I can pay you."

"Don't taint my efforts. Let my willingness be pure."

"Okay."

She turned and moved up the aisle toward the back of the store, her ponytail swaying. I thought if I had grown up next door to her or someone like her my life would have taken a very different course. But that was probably nothing more than wishful thinking.

I took another book off the shelf and continued reading, learning about how pagan rites could be either white-right-handed, clockwise, righteous, and graceful-or black-left-handed, widdershins or counter-clockwise, flying in the face of the natural order of the world.

The electronic bell signaled that someone had stepped into the store.

I'd made another mistake and left myself out in the open, too close to the front entrance. In the center of the aisle there was nowhere for me to run as Chaz Argento walked up with two soldiers who already had their weapons drawn. I'd never seen either of them before, which told me Chaz had farmed out for hard hitters loyal only to him and not to the Ganucci family. He was making his play.

I shut the book, put it back on the shelf, and our eyes met. Chaz let out a slow humorless smile.

He gestured for one of his legbreakers to search the store. The muscle-bound, no-neck thug stalked off and I thought I had to move now, while they were split up. I wasn't packing a gun but I had my knife. As a rule you didn't throw blades, but I was good enough that I could hit the remaining soldier's barrel chest. The knife wouldn't kill him, but it would hurt and scare him, and the blood would spook Chaz. I might just have enough of a diversion so that I could wade in and do some real damage.

Except it didn't happen. Kendra had already been on her way back to me and was only a few feet up the next aisle. The thug returned with her three seconds later, one huge hand clamping her shoulder.

The pain made her body twist before him, and she couldn't so much as get out a groan. He shoved the girl at me and she tumbled and hit the floor at my feet.

"Don't be a moron, Chaz," I said.

"Stop talking that way to me! I'm the new skipper. The Ganooch is gone. His consigliere is dead. Someone's got to run the business and I'm in line. You have no say. You have no right."

"I'm only asking for you to give me a few more days."

It got him laughing. "What kind of a mook do you make me for? You think you can bounce my crew off the walls and talk down to me and there'll be no repercussions? You think that's how things happen in this world?"

"We can work together."

"You're not listening to me. You never listen to anybody, now do you?"

Maybe it was true. I didn't go out drinking with the boys, didn't bust chops, didn't play high-stakes poker in the back rooms. Maybe I'd kept myself a little too far out of things for anyone in the crew to trust me now.

Chaz's boys each held a 9mm on me.

Kendra whimpered, "Please, I didn't do anything."

"Sorry, miss," Chaz said, sounding genuinely apologetic. "Maybe if you'd been a good little girl and gone to church instead of dealing with all this heathen c.r.a.p you wouldn't be in such a tight spot right now."

Chaz was trying to ramp himself up for the hit. He was building drama, making himself angry, indulging himself and basking in the dreamy glow of how good life would be once I was out of the way.

Kendra did what any normal person would do. She made a break for it. Her fight-or-flight response took over and her terror forced her to run down the aisle away from me. I almost reached out for her. One of the goons snapped off a shot. It was low and took Kendra in the small of her back.

She crumbled and turned over twice, the ponytail still wagging, her expression falling in on itself as the dreaded understanding of her own impending death overtook her. No handsome boy would ever take her out dancing again. Her face filled with an immense loss and her gaze settled on me. She didn't hate me even now; she was just astonished by how events had unfolded like this, so quickly, so badly, in an unstoppable chain of fated moments. She tried crawling but only made it a couple of feet before she lay dead with a kidney shaped pool of blood spreading toward the shelves of her indifferent and useless magical books. It also washed toward me.

"That was a mistake," I told Chaz.

"I've made 'em before," he said, "I'll make a few more before my time is up."

"No you won't."

I reached for the goofer dust and hurled it at Chaz and his men. The instant I released the jar I spun aside and drew my knife. The gla.s.s broke against Chaz's chest, nearly knocking him down, and sent a cloud of ash up. Two shots roared past me. That was the problem with hiring freelancers, you never really knew how good they were in a tight spot. In less than a second I hurled the blade as well.

I was still weak, but there was enough force behind my throw for the blade to take one of the thugs in the neck. It barely nicked the guy's carotid but it was enough to get a high arc of arterial spray going. He overreacted and started screaming as his blood spurted up in front of his eyes. The dust had them coughing and teary-eyed. I marched in on them thinking, My hands are fast. They can break rock. I'm a torpedo. I don't waver. I don't stand down. An innocent is dead because of me. I have the willpower to beat my enemy. I can outlast them all.

I wasn't anywhere near form, but I didn't have to be. Chaz turned and tried to bolt. A moment later the other two made a run as well. It didn't matter. I took some time. I was lucky the store was empty. Hardly anybody believed in magic anymore.

On the subway ride back I started to fall asleep. I figured the succubus wouldn't attack on a train full of people, but for all I knew it never manifested in the world anyway, only in my mind. I had just killed three men and it somehow made me content. Maybe because I had lived through it, maybe because I was simply evil.

As the train slipped down the tunnel under the East River and the darkness settled in around us, I nodded off enough for another fever dream to hit. I could hear myself panting in the car. Sweat dripped down my neck and over the knot of my tie. It was too dark to see anything but I looked down anyway and saw Kendra there holding my left hand. So lovely and cute and with that smile that could have altered my entire life. She said, "Infection."

I snapped fully awake with a start.

I knew where to find the witch.

Tommy came in wearing one of the Ganooch's suits and smelling of his old man's aftershave. I hadn't expected Tommy to fall for such a commonplace convention as following in his father's footsteps, but here it was.

He took a stance that also mimicked the Ganooch, shoulders high, hands clasped together low.

He said, "I'm taking over the business. I'm going to fight Chaz for the leadership."

"You won't have to," I told him. "Chaz is dead."

"He is? How? When?" He c.o.c.ked his head at me. "You?"

"Yes."

"Why? For me?"

It got a chuckle up from deep down in my chest. "Tommy, you don't have the heart for this business, but if you want to give it a go, I won't try to talk you out of it. But I can tell you now that you'll be dead within three months. n.o.body will follow you. Whoever claims to be loyal to you will just be setting you up. All your men will filter over to one of the other families or move on out to LA or Chi."

His handsome, youthful face looked almost bratty. "And you? Won't you be my right hand?"

"No."

"Why not?" His voice was tight. "Are you running out too?"

"In a matter of speaking, Tommy."

He squared his shoulders like he wanted to take a poke at me. I stared at him and saw a reckless boy trying to step up and be the man of a family that performed acts he would never be able to fully understand or accept.

I said, "Go back to college, Tommy. Learn some other skill."

"But what about...?"

"Don't worry about your mother or grandmother. Provisions have been made. There's enough money floating around from all the legal enterprises, stocks, bonds, money markets, and bank accounts to keep things running exactly as they are for a very long time. n.o.body's going to move grandma out onto the street."

"And the crew? The captains?"

"Let it all dismantle itself. You won't have to lift a finger. It'll all play out the way it's meant to, and by the time you graduate and get a job on Wall Street you'll be head of all the above-board businesses."

He seemed to consider it seriously. He looked at me and gave a grimace and a half-nod, perhaps agreeing with me or maybe only coming to some different decision. I didn't know and didn't really care anymore.

I walked downstairs to the kitchen, unlocked the wine cellar, and went down into the depths where I found a rare bottle of Amarone. The Ganooch had paid sixteen grand for it. I didn't know why. I opened it and took a deep pull, enjoying the full-bodied taste of the fat Corvino grapes that they let turn to raisins for a stronger concentration of flavor. Or so the Ganooch told us around the dining room table one evening.

It reminded me of the wine we used to drink at ma.s.s during communion. I wanted to confess my sins but there wasn't enough time. There would never be enough time for that.

I left the half-emptied bottle on the floor and headed back up the cellar stairs. I walked the main house. The place had a near deathly quiet. I pa.s.sed our soldiers, looking uncertain and clearly planning their defection. I heard Helen weeping inside her bedroom. I wanted to let her know that more pain was coming, but it wouldn't last, and if she just held on a little longer she might find a better life for her waiting down the line. I didn't think she could, though. I suspected she was going to off herself soon, and there was nothing I could do about it.

I kept prowling. Grandma recited the rosary. I pressed my forehead to her door. I listened to her reciting the Hail Mary in Italian, over and over again, maybe for the ten thousandth time in her life, maybe for the millionth. I stood there for twenty minutes, her voice sometimes growing stronger, sometimes only a whisper, the same prayer almost sounding like it was becoming other words and appeals as her tone shifted and my concentration waned. I'd thought I was special but I wasn't. She had more willpower than I did. She was a truly powerful woman able to find fort.i.tude in her grief. She would outlive me.

I moved down the corridor. Tommy's door stood open. He had several suitcases open on his bed and he was placing his folded clothes carefully inside them. I thought if any of us had a chance, it might be him.

I came to Gina's room. I put my hand on the doork.n.o.b and could feel a kind of electrical buzz going through it. But the strange tingling didn't really touch my hand. Instead it danced through me and shocked the back of my head.

I tried the door and it was locked. I put more effort into it, braced my shoulder against the wood and exerted pressure. The door itself wasn't holding me back but some other force was. A will at work.

I gritted my teeth and kept trying. I glanced down at my wrist and spotted four small black indents in my flesh. I'd barely noticed them before but now they stood out against the thick blue veins twining up my forearm.

That's where I'd become infected.

On the day of the Ganooch's funeral. That night was the first time the succubus, the G.o.ddess, had come to me.

I remembered the moment I'd received those near-invisible indents. During the service, Gina had taken my left wrist and dug her fingernails in, determined not to fall apart in church.

Whatever venom she'd set loose in me had begun to do its job right then.

I had my own will at work. My forehead began to heat. I clenched my jaws together and gritted my teeth. I had just murdered three men. I had been the cause of an innocent woman's death. The devil was here.

The wood began to crack as I pressed my weight against it harder and harder. I wanted to keep it as quiet as possible. I heard laughter inside the room. I might've even chuckled a bit myself. Where there's grace, there's depravity.

The jamb began to buckle, the lock gave way, and I stepped in.

Gina was seated at her vanity, wearing nothing but a silken see-through shawl, brushing her hair. The tri-fold mirror situated around her didn't reflect her face from three sides. Instead, it showed different, shifting images. From the brief amount of reading I'd done in the Weird Sisters shop I knew this was a scrying mirror, magical gla.s.s used to show future or past events.

I saw the two of us in bed. My father's garage with the poster of Jayne Mansfield on the wall. Me and Frankie playing racquetball. I saw myself snapping Portman's neck. I watched my old man die. It hadn't been the Jamaicans who'd killed him like I'd long thought. I watched my mother rise from a crouch behind a cl.u.s.ter of trash cans and murder him with a butcher knife while he'd stumbled drunkenly toward home.

It didn't surprise or startle me. It didn't hurt me. My old man deserved what he got. I was only bothered that my mother had given her life away to the church out of guilt, when she shouldn't have felt ashamed for doing what she'd done out of self-defense. He would've beaten her to death eventually.

Gina continued drawing the brush through her gleaming black hair.

I wondered how long she'd been studying me from afar. Maybe the devil whispered all my secrets in her ear. I wanted to know when this had all started. When she'd taken the first step down the path to becoming a witch. But it didn't matter. Like Kendra said, as soon as evil was in your heart, you didn't have to go looking for the devil. The devil would find you.

"Why don't you change the channel on that thing," I said, "and watch moments from your own life?"

"I do," Gina said, almost primping even though she couldn't see her own face in the mirror. "I've witnessed all my own mistakes, all the secrets that my father tried to hide from me."

"He hid them for a reason."

"Not a good enough one." She turned in her seat, the curves of her lithe body accented by the draping of her garment. I saw the hate in her face then. It had been tamped down and hidden for a long time, but now it seeped to the surface and darkened and deepened every line. "You feel like a fool, don't you?"

"Yes. I should've started off looking closer to home for the enemy."

"That's what I had to do," she said.

"Your father wasn't your enemy. Neither was Portman. Or me."

"You all were," she said. Her voice was tight and bitter. "You just didn't fully understand it. You thought I was so accepting. So involved. I was born bloodstained thanks to this family, this business, you people."

"Everyone's born bloodstained, Gina. That's just the natural way."

Beside the perfumes, combs, and creams on the vanity sat a trembling gla.s.s bottle. Inside I could see an odd black bug crawling and leaping and fluttering about. Portman's shadow.

I took another step into the room. It hurt like h.e.l.l and I almost went to my knees. It was like trying to walk through unseen razor wire. I grunted and my blood began to burn. The edges of my vision filled with colorful lights. I tried to shake my head clear. The cramps returned and nearly crippled me. The succubus didn't have to appear at night. It didn't have to appear at all. Whatever power it had, Gina had as well. It was her will. You don't have to call a demon because the demon will always find you.

"Why did you do this?" I asked. I had to breathe through my teeth. "Because you wanted the business?"

"Haven't you understood a word that I've said so far? It's because I hate this business and everyone a.s.sociated with it."

"Even me?"

"You most of all."

"Then why wasn't I first on your hit list?"

"You were."

"Then why aren't I dead yet?"

'There's nothing to kill in you. There's nothing alive in you." She smiled at me then and there wasn't anything in it that was the girl I thought I knew. "That's why you could only be murdered with l.u.s.t. But not love."

Maybe it was true. I tried to find something to say but there wasn't anything. I took another step toward her and the succubus tore at me. I hit the floor.

Gina stood over me and said, "I was raised in evil and that evil has stained me. I can feel all my father's victims screaming from their graves. All of the men you've killed. You think I'm lying. I know Chaz is dead. He's being flayed by a duke of h.e.l.l, who's whipping him with a cat o' nine tails made from two-thousand-year-old leather and bone. It's the same whip used to beat Christ along his walk through Jerusalem to Golgotha, the hill of skulls."

I thrashed on the floor, my clothes steaming. The succubus' claws raked my flesh. It felt like the G.o.ddess was tearing at me from the inside. I could feel her sc.r.a.ping at my spine, gashing my kidneys, squeezing my heart.

I'd sworn I would protect the family. I had failed in my promise. I'd held Gina in the cold night and whispered that I would keep her safe. I had been in the presence of an abiding madness and hadn't known it. And I'd made pledges to her that I would never let anything happen to her.

"Are you afraid?" she asked.

I couldn't even speak. I tried to shake my head no and could feel my eyelashes curling from the heat. My tears seemed to be boiling even before they fell. I could hear the demon's voice. It was Jayne's voice. It was Gina's voice. It was Lilith's voice, and every furious woman's voice going back to the moment the Garden of Eden had been locked behind humanity.

"I love you."