“I’m sorry. It’s the only one I knew.”
“No problem. Why are you looking for me?”
She takes a picture from her purse and sets it in front of me. It’s a young man, about my age when I went Downtown. He’s broad across the shoulders, like a football player. He has her eyes.
“This is my son. His name is Aki. It’s Finnish, like his father.”
“He’s a nice-looking kid. But I don’t know him, if that’s why you’re here.”
“You don’t know him, but he knows you. Your kind, I mean. He’s Sub Rosa, just like my husband’s family. Eighteen years ago we lived here, but we moved to my mother’s property in Lawrence, Kansas, when Aki was born. We weren’t sure we wanted him growing up here …”
She trails off and looks around the room. A bald man in a white silk suit takes what looks like a whiskey flask from his pocket and snaps it open. Inside is damp soil and pale, gray worms. He picks a worm up by its head and blows on it. The bug straightens, and when it’s rigid, the man lights one end with a cigarette lighter and smokes it.
“Aki just had his eighteenth birthday and wanted to come back to where he was born. Alone, of course. A young man wants to feel independent. How could we say no?”
A corn-fed Kansas farm boy full of bumpkin magic loose in L.A., what could possibly go wrong with that?
“My husband still knows people, Sub Rosa, in the area. He asked them to keep an eye on Aki, but it’s a big city. We haven’t heard from him in weeks. I know he knew people out here. He was corresponding with a Sub Rosa girl. I forget her name.”
“Do you have the letters with you?”
“No. They’re gone. He must have taken them with him.”
“Have you talked to your husband’s friends?”
“None of them knows anything.”
“Why are you coming to me about this?”
“I have a feeling something has happened to my son. I heard that you do things other people can’t or don’t want to do. There was a crime in the city earlier this year. I believe a cult was planning on sacrificing a group of kidnapped women. You stopped it.”
Is that what the tabloids are saying happened now? It’s annoyingly close to the truth. Couldn’t they have worked in some ETs?
“Listen, Evelyn.”
“How did you know my name was Evelyn?”
“Listen, Evelyn, I know you need help, but not from me. I’m not what you think I am.”
“What are you?”
“I’m a monster.”
I let that sink in for a second. She’s a nice woman, but Ziggy really fouled my mood. I kill off the tumbler of Aqua Regia.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but if your husband really is Sub Rosa, why isn’t he out here with you doing locator spells? Or echo tracing? Sloppy teenybopper magic usually leaves a fat shiny trail of residue all over the aether. Easy to follow.”
“My husband is dead. It was very recent and sudden. That’s why I was trying to get in touch with Aki. Now I might have lost both of them.”
She looks down at the coffee cup. Her heart is slowing, but not because she’s any more relaxed. My blackened arm is starting to heal. It burns and itches. I can’t help this woman. I don’t want to be here.
Carlos says, “I think you’re getting a little ahead of yourself. Why don’t you go to the cops or hire yourself a private investigator? You don’t need magic for this kind of thing. And from what I’ve seen around here, magic doesn’t really help anything. It just makes everything more confusing.”
She puts her hand on my arm.
“You saved all those people. Why won’t you help me?”
“Carlos is right. You need to go to the cops or hire yourself a detective. I’m not Sam Spade. That’s not what I do.”