“And bring me back my artifacts.”
“In an Easter basket with ribbons on top.”
I step into a shadow and get out of there before I change my mind and snuff all of them.
THE CHAPEL OF St. Alexis is an old Spanish-style mission, the kind you see all over Southern California. There’s nothing very impressive about it. It sits behind a rusty chain-link fence. The front doors are padlocked. Most of the stained glass windows are broken. Part of the roof has collapsed, leaving some of the roof beams exposed. Even the crooked cross over the front is a mildewed rotten tooth.
I don’t know why anyone would want to spend a fortune putting this hovel back together again. Of course, aside from fear, the God business runs on sentimentality. That’s the only explanation. Unless it’s a real estate scam. I’d feel a lot better about the place if I thought that was what was really going on. But I’m probably wrong. I usually am about these kinds of things. The chapel is just the obsession of a lot of poor slobs who’ve been convinced that fixing it up will buy them a ticket straight to Heaven. Man, are they going to be surprised when they get there.
The sun is already starting down, so half of the chapel is in shadow. I step through it and come out in the crypt below.
No one is here yet, but someone was working on the place. The floor has been swept clean and
there are halogen floods around the walls, lighting up the crypt like it’s noon on the solstice.
There are small vaults all around the crypt, three high, and each holding a single coffin. Extra-holy or extra-wealthy parishioners, I guess. Maybe old priests. Really, who cares? They’re dead and won’t mind my using their crusty corpses as a duck blind.
I climb behind a coffin in one of the second-tier vaults directly across from the crypt entrance. It’s deep and dark back here. Smells of dust and old bones. Not really comforting, but it’s good cover. The way the lights are set up, they throw some nice shadows into all the vaults, except the ones directly in line with the lamps. That might be useful later.
I try to get comfortable while I wait for sunset, but after a few minutes of wrestling with the armor I’m beginning to regret asking for it. Then I catch a glimpse of my still-bruised wrist and it reminds me of why I wanted it. I check the sight on the rifle for the hundredth time. Make sure I can reach the Glock inside my coat and the Colt at my back. I wish I had a drink. I wish I had a smoke. I wish I was at Flicker’s drive-in with Candy and a stolen Cadillac the size of Texas. And I wish whoever chooses the spots for these ceremonies could quit the Bela Lugosi bullshit. It’s always a crypt. It’s always a cemetery or a spooky old mansion where a family was murdered by a serial killer or angry Girl Scouts when they didn’t buy enough cookies. The next hoodoo ceremony I crash better be at Musso and Frank so I can get a decent martini when the killing is over.
I hear scraping from far away. A murmur of voices. The scrape turns into the sound of a door opening. More voices and, now, footsteps. A lot of footsteps. More footsteps than I was hoping for.
A few seconds later, they start filing into the crypt.
Shit.
There’s a lot of them. A lot.
Five magicians and ten heavily armed guards. Silly me hoping that, for a ceremony this important, those numbers would be reversed. Nothing I can do about it now except hunker a little farther back into the vault and wait to see how the scene plays out. I could start shooting now, but the magicians aren’t set up, and with the amount of firepower they have, they could escape while I’m dealing with a shitstorm. No. I’ve got to let the magicians start their ceremony and hope it distracts the guards before I do anything. That means patience, and I hate patience.
As if they know I’m waiting, the magicians take their sweet goddamn time about setting up. First, a carpet goes down in the middle of the crypt. Then they unfold a portable altar and start laying out the goods from a wooden trunk. And holy shit, they pass every single fucking one around so that each magician can bless it before putting it on the table just so and moving on to the next item. I swear, these clowns must be getting paid by the hour. I don’t know how much crap they have in that trunk, but we could be here until the Rapture starts and Elvis makes his big comeback.
Finally, one of the magicians closes the trunk. There are ten items laid out like the sephirot in a kabbalistic tree of life pattern. When they seem satisfied with the spread, they join hands and begin a low chant.
Kill me now.
The chant isn’t any better or worse than a hundred other chants I’ve heard, but the thing about chants is that they can go on for-fucking-ever. This one feels like it’s going for a record. Maybe it’s just me getting antsy, but even a few of the guards start looking restless. Thank you for validating my annoyance. Now hold still while I kill all of you.
Eventually, the magician at the base of the tree frees his hands and picks up a nearby knife. He slices his left palm and dribbles blood between the items on the table, creating the paths that connect each sephira. When he’s done, he picks up something from the lowest position on the tree and holds it up before him. It’s a gold medallion or a large coin. Either way, I can’t resist. The moment he opens his mouth to utter some hoodoo, I use the rifle to put a bullet straight through the center of the coin and into his forehead. It takes a second for everyone’s brain to process what they just saw, and in that second I open up on the rest of the magicians. I get three of them with head shots, but the fourth I hit in the shoulder. By then, the guards have figured out my position and opened up on me. What seems like a hundred rounds pepper the vault where I’m hiding. Before I can slip through the shadow in the back of the vault, a couple of shots hit me in the chest. The armor stops them, but the force is like being hit by a reasonably large buffalo. It knocks me backward into the shadow.
While the guards concentrate their fire on the vault where I’m definitely not, I use another shadow to come out on their side. I blow through my first clip quickly and take down three of them. The other seven figure out where I am, but before they can open fire on me, I slip out the back of that vault …
… and come out in a vault on the opposite wall. I fire down on them while their backs are to me. I get three more of them before they zero in on my new location. Just as I’m changing clips and getting ready to bail out of there, a ricochet flashes right across the vault where I’m hiding, snapping off the rifle’s trigger, so fuck my luck again.
I fall back into a shadow and come out behind them on the floor of the crypt, holding the rifle by the barrel and swinging it like a baseball bat. I knock two down on their faces and finish them with the Glock before disappearing again.
The last two guards make a break for the door with the injured magician between them. To his credit, the magician pushes away from them and screams hoodoo into the crypt. This gives me plenty of time to get behind the guards, snap the na’at out into a sword, and take off both of their heads.
The remaining magician, pale and leaking blood from his bullet wound, is smart. I recognize his hoodoo. It’s going to rain mystical flaming knives down on me—or so it seems until, at the last minute, he replaces a couple of words of the spell. Instead of knives raining down, he pulls down one of the walls on me.
I barely get out of the way in time.
The sound of the crash echoes off the rock walls of the crypt in a deafening slap. I bark Hellion hoodoo and a pillar of fire rises from the floor, shooting directly at him. He steps back and grabs an object off the tree of life, tossing it into the fire. As it hits he screams hoodoo and the fire sort of turns inside out, transforming from flames to water. He whirls to throw a curse at me, but I step into a shadow and come out behind him.
Good thing too. He pulled down another section of wall where I was standing.
When I’m right behind him I say, “Boo.”