…AND PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW

by

Barbara Hambly

Published by Barbara Hambly at Smashwords

Copyright 2015 Barbara Hambly

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Table of Contents

And Pretty Maids All In A Row

About The Author

…And Pretty Maids All In A Row

“You a wizard?”

Antryg Windrose leaned his elbows on the table – where he’d joined Joanna Sheraton for a cup of tea during a pause in his bartending duties – and regarded the questioner with his usual air of politely daft interest: Joanna, who’d gone two steps in the direction of a former school-friend glimpsed in the scrimmage around the bar, wheeled promptly and came back.

The man making the inquiry – tall for a Chinese, dressed in an aggressively slick fashion which combined way too much jewelry with gang tattoos on his neck and hands – looked like trouble of a sort that Antryg, as a relative newcomer to Los Angeles, might not be able to identify quickly enough to side-step.

And anyway, Antryg – lover, partner, friend and never-ending source of amusement and entertainment – would talk to anybody.

“I am,” Antryg replied. “Though of course I can’t prove it, since in this universe I haven’t any powers. But if one is born a wizard, one doesn’t cease to be one… I’m Antryg Windrose. And you are…?”

“So if you don’t have powers how can you be a wizard?” The Chinese ignored his outstretched hand.

“It’s a matter of perception and training.” Antryg widened his gray eyes behind thick, round-lensed spectacles. “And minor abilities, like seeing in the dark, which I gather is no more common in this universe than it is in my own.”

“Why do you ask?” Joanna stepped close, into range of the querent’s overpowering cloud of Jovan Musk.

The young Chinese sized her up with what impressed her as professional speed, glanced from her to Antryg and back, then asked her, “Is he crazy?”

“Yes,” she replied. “But he is a wizard.” She gave him the big smile she reserved for business clients to whose accounts she was about to append a seventy-five percent Aggravation Tax, and held out her hand. “I’m Joanna Sheraton. You’ve met Antryg—”

“Lester Chan.” He altered his body-language – consciously, she had the impression – and deployed a mega-watt smile. His eyes remained exactly like black ball-bearings, but he returned her grip with a manicured hand. “A friend of mine said your pal claims he’s a wizard—”

“Please do sit down.” Antryg scooted his chair over – furniture at Enyart’s had a vaguely science-fictional quality, slick, black, and not designed with human anatomy in mind – and reached one long arm to the next table to drag over a third seat for their guest. At eleven o’clock on a Thursday night the noise-level at Enyart’s was annoying without precluding conversation, even with the sound-system jacked to carry over it (it was Jim the manager’s turn to pick the music, so tonight was wall-to-wall Rolling Stones), but at this hour the place was emptying out. The low lighting gave the impression of a pastel cave. The Beautiful Kevin, concocting Piña Coladas and Fuzzy Navels at the bar in Antryg’s stead for the moment, caught Antryg’s eye and sent over a waitron with a couple of beers.

Antryg poured himself another cup of tea and asked in a voice like jeweled brown velvet, “Now – Tell me exactly why you’re looking for a wizard.”

Chan studied him for a moment, then looked sidelong at Joanna, who had taken her seat at Antryg’s side. Uneasiness sat oddly on him: clearly he wasn’t a man who often found himself hesitant about what to say or how to say it. He started out with, “So you’re from another universe?”

“Well, I can’t prove it,” apologized Antryg. “So you’ll have to take me at my word, I’m afraid… Joanna can’t prove I am, either,” he added, as Chan’s glance shifted to Joanna again. “But clearly you’re prepared to believe me, or else you wouldn’t have sought me out… Not that you necessarily have to be looking for a wizard to come into Enyart’s on a Thursday night, of course, Enyart’s is quite a respectable establishment and their banana daiquiris are reportedly excellent. Would you say their banana daiquiris were excellent, Joanna? But you’ve had your mind siphoned—” He turned back to Chan, “—haven’t you? When and where?”

Their guest drew back, and there was not the smallest shred of incomprehension in his eyes. “What do you mean, siphoned? I mean, that’s… What…? I haven’t—”

“When,” repeated Antryg gently, “and where?” He folded his long fingers together, crooked where the bones had been broken by the Witchfinders in his own world. “And by whom?”

“That’s – um – that’s what I need to ask you. I mean, you’re supposed to know these things—”

“Oh, I do,” agreed Antryg, “I do. But you will need to tell the truth.” He said it as he’d have said, We’ll be visiting the Amazon rain-forest so you will need to bring an umbrella, and Chan made a slight shooing gesture, as if dismissing awkward facts.

“Look, I’m not saying I’m some saint with a halo on my head, okay? I smoke a little Thai in the evenings to relax and I’ve been known to do a popper or two when I’ve got a big night coming up, you know? But in my business you’ve got to stay away from most of that stuff or you go down the toilet fast.”

“And your business is—?”

“Entrepreneur. I do a lot of things.”

I bet you do, thought Joanna.

“So there was this girl,” said Chan. “I dated her – uh – two or three times. Uh, Jennifer, her name was. And I didn’t do any kind of upper or popper or anything when I was with her, just good clean sex, you know? We had a couple of drinks, but that was all. But afterwards…” The gesture of his hands tried to shape from the air something for which there was no word, not even a concept. “I didn’t feel right. I just… What did you mean, my mind was siphoned? I don’t feel like myself. That’s the closest I can say about it. Sometimes I’ll sort of wake up, and realize I’ve been sitting for nearly an hour, just… Not doing anything. Not aware of time, not aware of what’s going on around me, nothing. My friends say they’ve found me like that, they’ll sort of wake me up, only I’m not really asleep. I’m just… not there.”

His slick delivery – the casual way he’d tossed off the account of his dates with “uh, Jennifer,” – altered as he spoke, and Joanna could see the sweat start all along his hairline, and hear the suppressed crack in his voice. That’s the real part. Behind the Coke-bottle glasses, Antryg’s eyes had grown both distant and disconcertingly intent, matching up the story with things he already knew.

Things no person in Los Angeles in 1988 had any business knowing.

“And I… sometimes it’s like I’ll forget who I am.” Chan’s voice sank, and groped for meaning. “Or stuff about my life, about my family and friends, or where I came from, crazy stuff like that. And I don’t… I don’t feel the way I used to. My friends, and my brother, or girls I know, it’s like they’re just… just cardboard stand-ups, you know? I don’t care about them. Not even my brother… I know who they are, but sometimes it all means nothing. And sometimes it’s like I’m turning into a cardboard stand-up too.

“So is she like a – a witch, or what’s going on? It’s just since I was with this girl. I swear it’s not drugs. If I go to a doctor that’s the first thing he’s going to say, and it’s not. I can’t afford this to happen… I mean, completely aside from losing… losing what I feel about my brother—”

His voice faltered again.

“—I can’t afford to lose my edge. It’s a competitive world out there, you know? I can’t slip. And I’m slipping. I can feel it.”

“Just since you were with this girl?” Antryg tilted his head a little.

“Yeah!”

“Where would I find her?”

“I don’t know.” He made the shooing gesture again. “Look, can you help me? My grandma used to talk about Hungry Ghosts, that would eat your soul up. Are those…” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Are those real?”

Antryg’s eyes widened with surprise at the question. “Well, yes, but that doesn’t sound like what’s going on here.”

Chan looked disconcerted, but continued, “So if I see this girl again, how do I control her? Is there something you can make, or do, so I don’t… so she doesn’t do this to me? And how do I get myself back to the way I was?”

“I thought you didn’t know where she was,” put in Joanna. “Which would mean you’re not seeing her.”

“She may come back,” said Chan quickly. “I got to be ready.” He turned back to Antryg. “Mostly, I’ve got to… to get myself back. To undo what she did… Siphoned my mind?”

“Well,” said Antryg, “your self, actually. Your soul.”

The “entrepreneur” looked slightly queasy at the thought. “Can I get it back from her? If I find her, I mean.” He turned his untouched beer-glass on the black shiny surface of the table. “Has she… Has she got it, someplace? Isn’t that what a wizard knows about? My grandma talked about wizards in stories and stuff, and how they could get rid of the Hungry Ghosts. It sounds crazy—” He shook his head. “But I swear to you this is really going on.”

“Oh, I believe you.”

His eyes brightened with hope. “Can you do something for me?”

Antryg opened his mouth to reply, then paused, reconsidering his words. When he said, “Not at the moment,” Joanna was positive that wasn’t his original plan.

“But I will look into it – do you have a card? Or a telephone number where you can be reached? Splendid!” He grinned toothily. “And how long has it been since you’ve seen Jennifer? And has she a last name?”

“Uh – Wilson. And – I guess I saw her a couple of months ago.”

“Two? Three?”

“Two.” He had to think about it.

“Excellent.” Antryg’s jack-o-lantern smile broadened. “Excellent. I shall be in touch—”

“You can’t do anything for me now? Give me something, show me how to control her. I’m not asking you to do this for free—”

Chan produced a gold clip from his breast-pocket, detached two hundred-dollar bills from it, and held them out between index and middle fingers, invitingly.

“Let me look around a little, first.” Antryg folded his hands again. The soft light from the bar glinted on his spectacles, on the garish pink rhinestones of his earrings. For an Archmage in exile, reflected Joanna, he didn’t appear particularly convincing – few wizards, she was fairly certain, would be caught dead in a Bee-Gees t-shirt. (She herself wouldn’t, that was for sure).

But Chan, whoever the hell he really was, only nodded, and glanced back over his shoulder two or three times on his way to the street door onto Ventura Boulevard.

*

“The problem is, it’s not magic.” Antryg folded his hands over the sprawling monstrosity of hybridized computer-parts and Leggos that occupied three-fourths of his worktable, connected by wires to a mostly-disassembled pachinko machine and four Coke-bottles half-filled with God only knew what. Joanna had heard him come in at about three – he biked the eight miles from Enyart’s to 75313 Porson Avenue – and climb the stairs of the shabby Craftsman bungalow they’d bought with the contents of an evil renegade wizard’s stolen bank-account. But, not much to her surprise, instead of coming to bed he’d gone into his workroom, a chamber that had formerly been the sleeping-porch across the back of the house. She’d heard him moving softly around for nearly an hour, before she’d gotten up.

She’d said, “What is it?” as he lit a candle – he had been working, as he usually did, in darkness, since he really could see in the dark – and he’d known she didn’t mean, What’s bothering you? She knew jolly damn well what was bothering him.

“Any form of vampire isn’t something you want wandering about loose in a city the size of Los Angeles,” he went on, and checked the alignment of his Coke-bottles. The candle-flame, repeated in the lenses of his spectacles, gave him an other-worldly look he hadn’t had in the more prosaic ambiance of Enyart’s, though she’d still have had trouble convincing anyone that he was not only a wizard, but the Archmage of the Council of Wizards. The other members of the Council – who’d exiled him two years previously – had trouble with that one, too.

He frowned, sipped his tea – she’d seen it sitting on the corner of a bookshelf for at least two days – and poured the remainder of the cup into one of the bottles. “And it doesn’t sound like any of the varieties that are native to this universe, which is a pity. That’s if our friend Lester was telling the truth.”

Joanna closed her mouth on, WHAT ‘native to this universe’??!!?? and answered, “He looked pretty shook up to me.”

“Oh, he was. But that doesn’t mean he was telling the truth.” As he spoke Antryg opened and shut the drawers of an old library card-file that stood in one corner, looking for something – Joanna glimpsed electronic components, dried animal-skulls, empty baby-food jars and thrift-store jewelry before he found what he was looking for, which was an old disk-drive, which he shook, then put his ear against as if to detect some sound within.

“The problem with mind-vampires – soul-vampires – lamia, they’re sometimes called – is that their victims can’t be trusted to tell the truth. Sometimes they don’t know the truth, but often it’s because they actually don’t want to give up being siphoned. The physical sensation is, I am told, intensely pleasurable.”

“So somebody may be protecting her?”

“Oh, almost certainly someone is. Quite probably Lester himself. And because this form of lamia—” He gestured at the labyrinth of wires, plastic, Bondo, and silicon on the table, presumably a tracking device, “—doesn’t seem to be a creature of magic – it’s simply a predator that has found a way to slip through the Void to this universe – it’s going to be difficult to locate.”

Joanna recalled the gang tattoos on Lester Chan’s neck and hands, the gold money-clip and the inhuman hardness of his eyes. “So if Lester really knows where this babe is – and I don’t for one second believe her name is Jennifer Wilson – and may be protecting her with the help of some of his homeboys, do we really need to rescue him?”

Antryg, hunting through drawers again, looked up at her, startled.

“He’s a gangster,” Joanna explained patiently. “A criminal.”

“Really?” The gray eyes widened. “You can tell looking at him?”

“Can you, in your own world?” She recalled some of the scummier individuals she’d encountered in the waterfront taverns of the realm of Ferryth, and couldn’t imagine him letting any of them get close enough to him to pick his pockets.

“Well… In some circles I’m regarded as a criminal myself. I do like to give people the benefit of the doubt.”

“So do I,” she agreed. “But not if the victim we’re trying to save is going to have his buddies shoot us for trying to get rid of his pet vampire instead of just showing him how to ‘control her’ – for God knows what purpose. I mean, isn’t his problem going to be sort of… self-cleaning? He will eventually die from this, won’t he?”

“Oh, absolutely. Well, not absolutely, but he won’t be alive in any real sense. The problem is…” Still holding the disk-drive Antryg walked to the window, a tall thin form silhouetted against the pre-dawn darkness. He stood looking out, his free hand extended a little so that his outspread palm nearly touched the screen: Joanna had seen an artist friend of theirs make the same gesture, gauging the heat of a kiln.

His brows drew together and he closed his hand, unable to touch magic in this magic-less world, and he turned his face aside – Joanna said, “Well, yeah. The problem is when she’s done with him, she goes and gets another one.”

“It’s a problem, of course. But there is a bigger problem.” He looked back at her, and the worry in his eyes was of the order that usually scared the hell out of Joanna. “You’re quite right: I’m sure Lester is a gangster. And a criminal. And he probably does have a lot of friends with guns who do things like steal cars and sell drugs and kill people….”

Crap. “Will he become a vampire?”

He looked startled that this would have occurred to her – as if she hadn’t done her homework, or thought that George Washington was still the President of the United States. “I doubt it,” he said. “The real danger is that she’ll become human. And that will be infinitely worse.”

*

Jim Hasselart, who managed Enyart’s and had numerous friends on the LAPD, stopped by the Psychic Heart – where Antryg told fortunes four mornings a week – three days later with the information that yes, Lester Chan was well known among his LAPD friends. The young “entrepreneur” worked out of an office in the fabric district downtown: “Probably more than one. You know the fabric district, Antryg?” While Jim had never said whether or not he believed that his weekend bartender was an exiled wizard from another universe, he did accept that he was, in the words of old TV detective shows, not from around here… and in any case two years of combat in South Vietnam had rendered Enyart’s manager proof against whatever random weirdness Los Angeles had to offer.

When Antryg shook his head Jim transferred his bright, brown glance to Joanna, who said, “I’ve driven through it…” She’d stopped by the shabby little bungalow on Saticoy Avenue to have coffee on her way in to the offices of Blazon Entertainment, whose computer system she was untangling for the fifth time in four months owing to the unwillingness of Blazon’s administrative staff to follow backup procedures.

“Blocks and blocks of old buildings, sewing shops mostly, or small manufacturing. There used to be more of that back in the ‘fifties than there is now, so the fifth, sixth, seventh floors of a lot of ‘em are empty. God knows what’s up there now.” Jim shook his head, and Antryg, perched on a tall stool and shuffling the well-worn Tarot deck while he listened, flipped out a card onto the silken table-cover at random: The Lovers. He fed it back into the pack without a blink, and went on shuffling.

“I got lost off the freeway one night,” offered Joanna, “trying to get home from Ruth’s dad’s construction company. I think that’s where I ended up. It was spooky: totally deserted, like those old science fiction films where somebody’s dropped a neutron bomb. Ruth tells me she’s seen rats down there the size of cats.”

“What did Chan want with you?”

“Advice about Hungry Ghosts.” Antryg raised his eyes from the cards he’d laid out, a disconcerting pattern of cups and swords with, Joanna couldn’t help noticing, all four Page-cards reversed. She tried to remember what Pages signified, and couldn’t. “Though he didn’t seem certain whether to believe in them or not.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“That his girlfriend wasn’t one.”

Jim laughed, as if relieved, but said, “You watch out for that guy, Antryg. Even if he only wanted advice about his love-life, he’s not somebody you want to get mixed up with. He offer you money?”

“We didn’t touch it,” Joanna hastened to assure him.

“I’m crazy,” affirmed Antryg, gathering in the cards, “but I’m not stupid – at least, not about that sort of thing.”

“Good,” said Jim, and Antryg dealt another card onto the gaudy table: Death on his pale horse. Reversed.

The conversation passed to other matters.

The following morning, as soon as Rush Hour traffic had subsided, Joanna drove Antryg down to the crowded zone bounded roughly by Highway 10, Figueroa, Ninth, and San Pedro Streets, where decrepit buildings housed innumerable little factories, carpet-stores, and import houses, and tiny shops disgorged their wares onto the sidewalks in a fashion much more reminiscent of Mexico City or an oriental souk. Curiosity prompted her, and the awareness that after nearly a year in Southern California Antryg – though much better about it than he had been at first – still had trouble distinguishing customary patterns from behavioral anomalies… Not, Joanna admitted, that she herself could tell a garden-variety hooker from a lamia on the hunt, but still…

They spent a hot and tiring autumn afternoon moving through the crowds of Hispanic ladies and bargain shoppers, vendors of hot-dogs and designers on the prowl, Joanna poking in delighted mystification through shop after shop of cut-rate lingerie, designer knock-off jeans, quinceanera supplies and bolts of every variety of fabric from silk velvet to sleazy chartreuse polyester with pink and yellow flowers. Antryg moseyed in his usual leisurely fashion along the cracked sidewalks, stopping now and then to pass his hands over the grimy brick of the walls, his eyes half-shut, as if he were listening for a sound, sniffing for the smell of smoke on the wind. Against Joanna’s advice he bought churros, dulce de leche, and chunks of Mexican watermelon from assorted street-vendors and didn’t get sick (which had not been Joanna’s experience with similar treats the one time she’d tried them) – but then, Antryg had the digestion of an ostrich and could consume nearly anything without ill effects. She suspected this was a spell, despite what he said about magic not working in this universe. He also purchased a propeller-beanie whose green blades supposedly glowed in the dark.

“Is she down here?” asked Joanna, when they finally returned to the car.

“She’s been here, yes. She seems to be hunting in a fairly small territory – I didn’t sense traces of her anywhere north of Eighth or west of Los Angeles Street. I notice there are a lot of homeless east towards San Pedro Street, where she’s been the most…”

“Makes sense.” Joanna edged into traffic on the 110, which was still moving; maneuvered into the lanes that would put her onto the 101. “If you’re a vampire, I’m guessing you don’t want to hunt anybody whose friends and family are going to make a fuss.”

“I don’t think it’s quite as easy as that.” Antryg removed his beanie, and flicked the propeller with a long, crooked finger. “Lamia can be very indiscriminate about who they hunt, and because they absorb energy a little at a time – as our friend Chan found out – it takes awhile for their victims to realize they’re being victimized. And though they’re brilliantly manipulative, they’re actually not very smart. The problem is that psychically, one becomes what one devours. If Jennifer – or whatever her name is – has been preying on the… the homeless, the mentally disturbed, the drunkards, the addicts… the lost souls who are the only ones down here late at night…”

“And on Chan.”

“Who, I would guess, is using her as a prostitute. Men who embrace lamia become addicted to the sensation very quickly. They go back to them… which is a much more efficient form of hunting, I suppose. And with every victim, the lamia herself becomes a little more violent, a little less concerned, a little more addicted herself—”

“Like the files in a computer becoming corrupt, from a corrupt disk.”

“I was going to say, like a child learning habits of cruelty and selfishness from cruel and selfish guardians. But I suspect it amounts to the same thing.” Antryg frowned out past the concrete retaining-walls at half-glimpsed roofs, billboards, shop-signs. “The question is now, how do I find her, before she escapes our friend Lester’s control completely and learns enough about this world to hunt on her own?”

*

That problem, at least, took care of itself the following Wednesday night.

Antryg took the bus downtown late in the afternoon, saying he wanted to narrow down the lamia’s hunting territory when the crowds were gone.

“You want me to go with you?” Joanna produced a Thomas Brothers Map Book from her purse and held it out to him helpfully. Always a believer in being prepared, she also had a set of Allen wrenches, a tube of sun-block, four blank three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks, a bottle of water and a can of mace in there, as well as her wallet. “I’ll be home by eight, unless traffic is really heinous.”

“I should be all right.” He shrugged into his much-dilapidated Army fatigue-jacket, and spread the map-book out on the dining-room table, studying the map of Downtown as if memorizing it (he probably was, Joanna reflected). “If she’s down there regularly I think I’ll have a far easier time actually encountering her by myself, although… Good heavens!” As he’d spoken he’d taken a handful of buttons from a dish on the sideboard behind him and had dropped them onto the map-page; he regarded the resultant random pattern with startled shock..

“What is it?”

“The boy who wore this—” He picked up a light-blue shirt-button “—kept a frightful collection of pornographic magazines under the rug in his bedroom, so his mother wouldn’t see them.” He swept the remainder of the buttons into his hand, and replaced them all in the dish. “The 453 Bus – or is it the 487? – should get me into Downtown… I’ll be quite all right,” he added again, seeing Joanna’s worried expression. “I’d rather you kept clear this, my dear. Lamia…”

He hesitated, as if fishing for words, then concluded simply, “I’ve put you in enough danger.”

“I’ve put myself in danger, pumpkin,” pointed out Joanna. For a moment she saw the cards he’d turned in her mind: the Lovers, and Death, and all those pretty-faced androgynous little Pages…. “I’m a volunteer.”

WHAT THE HELL AM I SAYING???

But to her great relief he shook his head, gave her his daft grin, and kissed her hand. “I may stop by the club to speak to Jim again, but I should be back here by ten.”

*

The problem was, Joanna knew, that what she’d said was perfectly true. Though living with a wizard sometimes scared the living daylights out of her – and, she feared sometimes when she’d wake sweating at three in the morning, there was the very real possibility that it would get her killed one day – she WAS a volunteer. That was the kind of person Antryg was. If his scattergun enthusiasm for life was infectious, so was the deep sense of responsibility that went along with his power… even in this world, where he had no power. He still saw things that others didn’t see, and perceived dangers that presumably would have been a lot easier to deal with if he’d had the ability to work magic spells at his disposal.

But he nevertheless felt he had to deal with them.

And she regarded herself, almost as unquestioningly, as his backup.

Was that why the Council of Wizards imprisoned him for all those years? she wondered, much later that evening as she gratefully edged her old blue Mustang off the freeway and guided it down Woodman Avenue toward Enyart’s’ parking lot. Not because he used his magic to meddle in the affairs of those who had no magic – who couldn’t defend themselves against magic… But because he could so easily get non-magic civilians like herself to follow him. To help him. To step into the line of thaumaturgic fire.

Did he LET himself be imprisoned?

Because he knows he can’t not be what he is? He can’t not do what he does?

She parked in the last space vacant in the lot – Parking Space Luck seemed to cling to the shabby Mustang even when Antryg wasn’t in the car – automatically fished her can of mace from her purse (though she’d never had call to use it and the lot was well-lit)(she’d long ago perfected the art of discreetly dropping it back out of sight the moment she reached the door of wherever she was going), stepped out of the car—

—and whipped around in shock as a man in a dark coat appeared out of nowhere (He must have been behind the car next to me…) with a gun in one hand, and reached for her arm.

Nine months of taking sword classes with Antryg – plus occasional brushes with trans-dimensional abominations – was probably (she later reflected) the reason that she was aware of her attacker’s approach so quickly. But the assault was so sudden, so unexpected, it was almost literally as if he’d materialized from the darkness at her elbow. Still, nine months of sword classes (not to speak of trans-dimensional abominations) did actually pay off: she brought up the can of mace, sprayed it point-blank into the man’s eyes, grabbed the gun up off the pavement when he dropped it (screaming) and bolted like a scared bunny-rabbit to the back door of Enyart’s.

“Jim!” she gasped. “Jim — Where’s Jim?” This to Mario the cook, who pointed to the swinging doors. The club was crowded for a Wednesday night. By the time Joanna (who was as usual the shortest person in the room) located Jim’s balding head above the sea of backs and shoulders, she saw the street door open to her right and Lester Chan come in, chuckling as if in genuine appreciation of a very good joke.

She reached Jim’s side first. “Call the police—”

He turned from the two women he was talking to at a table, face changing at the urgency in her voice.

“There’s a guy in the parking-lot…”

“Honey, relax.” Chan appeared at Jim’s other side. “Served Danny right for being such a bèn dàn trying to grab you like that. He’s never gonna live that one down!”

“He had a gun.” Joanna handed it to Jim, who immediately broke it open and checked the cylinder.

It was empty. In spite of herself Joanna felt extremely foolish, as if she’d run screaming from a water-pistol.

“And he got a license for it,” pointed out Chan.

“That still constitutes assault.” Jim slipped the revolver into his pocket, and Chan made a dismissive gesture: Whatever… keep it…

“We just trying to find your boyfriend, honey, that’s all. We need his advice—” His brows knit and he glanced warily at Jim. “And we need it pretty quick. We figured either you or him would show up here…”

“You air yourself,” said Jim, “or I’m callin’ the cops.”

Joanna hesitated, looked up at the club-owner’s face. “I think Antryg needs to hear about this,” she said quietly.

“I’m not letting you—”

“It’s okay. Please.” She took Chan by the sleeve, led him a few steps away (making sure Jim was between them and the door). Chan was trying to hide it, but there was something about the way he kept glancing over his shoulder…

He was scared. And she didn’t think it had to do with one of his boys facing charges for assault. He looked like a man who’d always have a lawyer on tap.

“Thanks, baby.” Chan impressed Joanna as a man who never remembered women’s’ names. He leaned closer and whispered in her ear, “I’ve got her. She’s in the car. I’ve really got to talk to your friend, like, right away.”

Since Joanna wasn’t about to go out to the car with Chan – God knew what was really out there – she called the house from the phone behind the bar, found a table, and sipped a Diet Coke waiting for Antryg to call back. Chan downed two whiskeys by the time Antryg walked in, about twenty minutes later, and kept glancing around him and at the door. “She’s – She’s out,” he told Joanna at one point, “I mean out like a light, in the back seat…” but the story he told her about how he’d happened to re-encounter “Jennifer Wilson” (whom he called Suzy three times) was so disjointed, so inconsistent, that she deduced he was either badly spooked, or had had a lot more of his personality siphoned in the intervening week. She suspected that Jennifer (or Suzy) had been forced into the car as “Danny” had tried to force her, but last week, she thought, Lester would have come up with a more convincing tale.

He nearly jumped out of his chair when Antryg finally breezed through the street door, and pushed his way through the crowd to seize the wizard’s arm. Jim, watching like a hawk from behind the bar, narrowed his eyes. Joanna saw Antryg bend his head down to listen, the pink bar-lights flashing off his glasses, then grasp Chan’s elbow and steer him back to the table.

“You got to help me,” Chan whispered frantically. “You gotta tell me what to do—”

“What is it?” asked Joanna – of Antryg, not Chan.

Chan dithered, and Antryg replied, “He says she’s dead.” He spoke in conversational tones, and such was the noise in the room (it was The Beautiful Kevin the Bartender’s turn to set the playlist, so it was ABBA all the way) that nobody gave a sign of having heard. “Did you kill her?”

“I – uh – No! It was… It was this guy named Steve. I saw him runnin’ away…”

Joanna didn’t even bother to ask Steve who? and, she noticed, neither did Antryg.

He killed her.

Shit. She felt sick with fright. Had she resisted…?

Softly now, Antryg said, “Let’s go look. Not you, Joanna,” he added, when she made a move to rise. “I want you to go home. I’ll be quite all right. These things can be very dangerous, particularly—” He turned to regard Chan, hovering at his elbow, “—if someone has been selling their services as prostitutes, which is what you were doing, wasn’t it, Lester? Don’t lie to me—”

Chan had opened his mouth with an expression of denial in his eyes.

Antryg seldom used what Joanna thought of as his Wizard Voice, possibly because – she had observed – when he used it, people did what he said. Sane or not. Dangerous or not. Maybe that’s what the Council of Wizards was trying to keep non-wizards safe from.

“She was fine with it!” Chan whispered defensively.

Joanna raised her eyebrows – Oh, YEAH? – but Antryg nodded, very slightly. Believing him and not surprised.

“And the johns loved her! Man, they were paying five hundred dollars an hour – if I’d ask for six, or seven, they’d pay it, they’d pay anything! My phone was ringing off the wall! And she was worth it! I’ve never—”

“No,” murmured Antryg. “No, I don’t suppose you ever have.”

He laid a gentle hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “That’s what they do,” he explained. “That’s what they are. That’s what they take from you – the deepest seed of what gives you the most pleasure, the taproot of your heart. It’s more than physical, much more. They take it, and feed their minds straight into it, so that they are everything – everything – that you most want and need. It’s how they hunt. They make their prey come to them… Again, and again, and again.”

Chan said nothing. Only gazed at him as if hypnotized, as if nothing existed around them – not the racket of the club, nor the gyrations of the dancers, nor the fear that had gripped him only minutes before… “That’s it, man,” he whispered. “That’s her. Everything – God, it’s like my flesh turned to light on my bones! But it’s like… I have to be with her! And now I’m not… I’m not myself…”

“Nor are any of the men she coupled with,” said Antryg. “All repeat customers, weren’t they? She’s been eating them, a little at a time, even as she was eating you. But you become what you eat. She became them. And she became you. Your ruthlessness. Your cleverness. Your selfishness. Those are all part of her, now. Their selfishness, and violence, and deceit, and entitlement. Whatever hatreds they carried in their hearts… for women or black people or themselves or whoever got in their way or might vaguely resemble someone in their past… Did she start escaping from wherever you kept her, to hunt on her own?”

Chan shook his head, as if he weren’t listening. “You got to show me how to get it back from her! I mean not hate or any of that shit, I don’t hate anybody… But now she’s dead, you can… you can bring it back out of her, can’t you?”

“Let’s see her.”

Antryg kissed Joanna, and stood on the corner of Woodman and Ventura beside the parking-lot to watch Joanna get into her car. As she crossed the lot, Joanna observed a big Lincoln, parked a short distance up Woodman Avenue – Chan walked toward it, turned back to wait for Antryg. Without much regret or sympathy, she wondered whether one of ‘the boys’ had taken Danny to the nearest ER to get the mace flushed out of his eyes, and if that was the reason there was nobody near the car. Surely with a dead girl – lamia or not – in the back seat, they wouldn’t leave the Lincoln unattended? She might have been doing all of them, Joanna realized. In which case NOBODY in that outfit is hitting on all their cylinders.

No wonder Lester wants help getting their souls back…

As she guided the Mustang out onto Woodman, she glimpsed a man walking alone down the other side of the street, with a sort of staggering aimlessness – saw him stumble off the curb. Danny?

She drove back to Granada Hills, more troubled, in a way, than she’d have been had she insisted on sticking at Antryg’s side.

In the year they’d lived together he’d done some insanely dangerous things, and had gotten her to do some insanely dangerous things, like hunt trans-dimensional monsters and run computer-cables into gaps in the Void between Universes… Not to speak of bringing her to the notice of the Council of Wizards, devious and unscrupulous for all their piety. She would not, she knew, have continued to occupy a house whose foundations were built over a time-bomb (Oh, wait, living in Southern California on top of the Northridge Fault amounts to that …)

Am I like poor Lester, addicted to something that’s going to get me killed one day?

Like all those poor saps phoning him begging to pay seven hundred bucks an hour to have their brains siphoned…

Their souls devoured.

Did she start escaping from wherever you kept her, to hunt on her own? he had asked, and she thought about the kind of people a lamia – a vampire – would meet, and devour, and become, cruising Skid Row in the small hours.

What finally pushed Lester Chan over the edge to kill his succubus? And more critically, what was his reaction going to be if Antryg had to break it to him that he was never going to get his lost moxie back. That he was always going to live in a faded world with only half a soul…

Or is there a Twelve-Step Program that can help him recover from that addiction’s toxic effects?

For Antryg’s sake she hoped there was…

At least she’s dead…

Porson Avenue was silent, the hill that rose at the end of the street a looming enigma against the stars. A possum – at least, at that size, Joanna sure hoped it was a possum – scrambled out of Mr. Parker’s garbage-cans and waddled hastily into the darkness. Windows up and down the street glowed dully blue with the reflection of TV sets, and somewhere a dog barked; the crunch of Joanna’s sneakers sounded loud in the curled brown leaves of the sweet-gum trees that some hopeful developer had planted in front of every house erected back in the ‘sixties. In front of her own (MY OWN!!! The triumph never went away) the scraggy live-oak that had stood three times that long half-obscured the view of the old bungalow’s steeper roof and Craftsman lines.

She locked the garage doors, hefted her mace-can in one hand (Not twice in one night, surely!) and her house-key in the other and walked up the gravel drive.

And saw someone waiting for her in the porch.

Oh shit…

A woman. A girl – She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Beautiful, but without the sleek perfection that usually rendered Joanna prey to her lifelong sense of inferiority (I’m too short, nose too big, bitten nails and can tell you what deck of the Starship Enterprise the rec room is on…).

This girl, with her doe-like brown eyes and soft cloud of dark hair, had a vulnerable look to her, a frightened hesitancy.

“Jo—Joanna?”

It’s the lamia.

Joanna stopped in her tracks.

Will mace do it?

She saw again the man staggering aimlessly down Woodland Avenue. Her heart seemed to stall, then raced. He was in the car with her…

“Don’t be afraid,” begged the girl. “Please! I need help.”

“Chan said you were dead.”

The girl moved to come down the porch steps and Joanna backed a pace down the walk, ready to flee and feeling silly, as she had about Danny’s gun. Why run from a fragile girl ten years her junior?

Except for the look in Antryg’s eyes. She is now them… whatever hatreds they carried in their hearts…

What kind of men would blow off five hundred or seven hundred dollars to hump a prostitute in an attic hidden in those empty factory lofts downtown? And go back again and again…?

“Please don’t run away! We mean no one harm. We’ve never meant anyone harm!”

“We?”

“My sisters and I.” She spread her hands, pleading. “It wasn’t our fault, none of it! We were prisoners, forced to do what we did! You must believe me!”

The words, That’s not what Chan said materialized in her mind only to vanish like smoke.

Bastard, she thought. Bastard…

The girl came down a step, her hand held out, and Joanna backed up again…

WE…

What if we were behind her somewhere in the dark? How many ‘we’ is ‘we’?

“What’s your name?” she asked. “And how did you learn mine?”

“He spoke to you,” the girl replied. “At the club. The wizard. Antryg. Antreges, Suraklin called him… Suraklin his master…”

Joanna could only stare at her in disconcerted shock. That was, indeed – as Antryg had told her – the pet-name the Dark Mage his master had given him as a gawky, lonely, terrified adolescent…

“He got you to buy this house for him, didn’t he?” the lamia said in her soft voice. “Got you to shelter him? Support him? Suzy is what Chan calls me, but the men – those he sells me to – give me other names.”

She stood for a time, gravely regarding Joanna with those dark frightened eyes.

“Suraklin,” she whispered, at length. “Your Antryg’s master. He used to make traps like this.” Her gesture took in the half-dozen mobiles hanging from the branches of the oak, strung-together conglomerations of wind-chimes, old keys, Victorian lamp-crystals and tiny bottles filled with mouse-bones and cinnamon-bark, moving with a faint silvery rattling in the wind. “We knew him, feared him… For months Antryg has been waiting… Seeking for us, luring us in spite of all we could do.”

Joanna’s mind fleeted to the vast sigil in the back yard which Antryg had wrought of broken dishes and pinwheels, to the insane jungle of Leggos and computer-parts spread across the table in the workroom. Inexplicable patterns that he’d told her were attempts to channel information – sensation – about the Void…

Was he lying?

“He brought you here?”

“These things make a magic that calls to my kind. Its pull is almost irresistible – even as are the spells that he has laid on you.”

“He hasn’t—”

The girl looked at her pityingly. “That is the nature of the Dark Mage’s power,” she whispered. “Those under Suraklin’s spells weren’t aware of them. They would deny – to the death, some of them – that anything save their own hearts constrained them. Even as Antryg did, I suspect…”

Joanna was silent. She’d known Antryg Windrose – journeyed in his company, lived with him, lain in his arms – for slightly over two years, and what she knew of him, she knew in fragments… and there was a great deal about which he never spoke. She knew the Council of Wizards had imprisoned him for seven years in the Silent Tower, for meddling in the affairs of those who had no magic… those who could not defend themselves against magic…

Maybe those who weren’t aware that magic was being used on them.

To buy a house for him. Shelter him. Support him.

In her mind she heard him say, They’re brilliantly manipulative… but for a moment the words seemed meaningless.

She managed to say, “No,” and shook her head.

Suzy opened her mouth and closed it again, struggling to find some way to get through to her…

From the age of fourteen, Joanna knew, until he was in his mid-twenties, Antryg had been the Dark Mage Suraklin’s pupil. His worshiper, his surrogate son. He’d fled, he had told her, when he’d guessed that his master planned to steal his body and displace his soul as a means of escaping his own enemies.

Beyond that he had spoken very little about the Dark Mage, but she knew he sometimes called out Suraklin’s name in his sleep.

“We knew Suraklin.” Suzy’s eyes flooded with tears. “And we knew Antryg. The Dark Mage travelled widely across the Void. When he found himself in worlds like this one, that lie far from the sources of magic, he would trap lamia, drink their souls, weave magic for himself from their blood. Little birds, he called us: not human at all. His pupil has waited for us a long time.”

Joanna said “No,” again, but in her heart she saw the wizard standing at the workroom window, gazing out into the darkness. Saw him sometimes as she did, when he’d wake after one of his nightmares, shaking and sweating; when he’d sit for hours in the darkness, one hand held out, palm-up, eyes shut as if he concentrated on calling the tiniest of spells, the blue flicker of witch-light, to his palm.

It never came. His crooked fingers, his broken hand remained empty, like the portion of his heart that had been formed by magic.

She wondered if its absence still hurt, like a phantom limb.

“Help us.” The girl wiped her eyes. “Please. He—” She whipped around again, her hand going to her throat. It was only the eerie screech of one of the killdeer that lived in the scrub-oaks of the hill at the end of Porson Avenue.

“Can we go inside, please?” She was trembling violently in her skimpy clothing, a slutty ensemble of red leather mini-skirt and lace blouse that Chan probably thought was sexy.

“Sure.” Joanna moved her hand for her purse, and realized she was still holding the mace. The mace that you took out for self-defense…

And now two minutes later you’re going to let this girl into your house? After seeing Danny?

Think about it, Joanna reminded herself.

IF Antryg was telling me the truth.

“Stand back,” she added, making an unobtrusively wide detour around the girl as she went up the porch steps. “I have to un-key the alarm system.”

Evidently Lester had some kind of alarm system on whatever building he kept this girl in (And what’s this WE crap…?), because Suzy hung back as Joanna unlocked the front door. Her heart raced so hard she could barely work the key, aware now that she was trapped between the lamia and the house wall (if it was Suzy who was lying and Antryg who was telling the truth…). She heard Suzy’s four-inch heels click on the planking even before she got the lock open, coming at her fast – she whipped through, slammed the deadbolt back into place, dashed for the stairs—

“Joanna!” Suzy’s voice was a wail of genuine-sounding despair. “Joanna, please…”

But the next instant the girl was ripping at the heavy-duty screen on the front window as Joanna dashed for the sword-rack in the dark living-room (Antryg never could remember to switch on lights…): two unsharpened training katanas, but Antryg’s real sword – the one that, according to their iaido sensei, had been made long ago to kill demons – was gone. Without stopping to wonder why she hadn’t noticed he’d had it with him down at Enyart’s earlier that evening – he could make almost anybody not notice almost anything – she pelted up the stairs to Antryg’s workroom and snatched, from the table, the thing he’d been working on late last Thursday night: two 40-mg Apple drives Bondo’d together amid a dangle of SCSI cables and a crystal the size of a filbert. There was a baby-size olive jar beside it, half-full of thin brown liquid. Joanna shoved both into her purse, opened one of the windows, scrambled out onto the roof of the back kitchen and, her heart in her throat, edged her way to the tree at the corner of the house.

She could hear footfalls in the house below her. Good. She’s inside, not out.

In seconds she was on the ground, fumbling with the lock on the garage door.

And I hope the widget I grabbed was the right one…

The Mustang’s tires threw gravel on Suzy as she dashed out onto the porch and Joanna headed for the 101 as if all the devils in Hell were at her back.

*

It was quarter past eleven when she got off the freeway at Maple Street. The fabric district – and the assorted other wholesale “districts” around it – looked, as she had said to Jim, like something straight out of a cheap 1950s science-fiction film. Harsh yellow-white street-lights, shadows like the pits of Hell. NOBODY in sight, the terrible, eerie stillness worse than a horde of shambling zombies would have been (ANYBODY can outrun zombies…)

God, I hope Lester doesn’t have a secret parking-lot…

Of course he has one. How many guys who can afford to pay $700 a pop for sex with Suzy and her sisters – HOW many sisters? – are going to leave their BMWs sitting out on Santee Street?

But, rather to her surprise, she spotted the Lincoln parked at the corner of Eighth and Wall. It was a zone of crumbly-looking utilitarian brick buildings with a solid phalanx of iron security-gates locked over every door in sight, and not a light in any window, but the big car, though empty, was unscathed. (Like any local hood’s going to mess with a ride that practically screams GANGSTER…)

She parked the Mustang behind it, got out (mace-can in hand again), ascertained that it was locked and peered through the tinted rear windows to see if anyone was in the back seat—

“Lady!” a boy’s voice – a youth’s voice – yelled behind her and Joanna swung around in terror. Two boys – half-grown young men – were running toward her from across the street and she bolted back to the Mustang—

“Lady don’t run away! Don’t— God damn it, Nicky, run!” The boy who’d shouted to her yanked on the arm of his companion, who was lagging, stumbling, like a sleep-walker. “Lady, please…”

Joanna stood still beside the Mustang, but she guessed what “Nicky’s” problem was, and her heart twisted with understanding and pity.

My brother, Lester had said. He looked about sixteen.

Oh, shit…

Both boys did, when they got close to her. Nicky – taller, thinner, with a few optimistic strands of mustache decorating his upper lip – pulled half-heartedly against the grip of his plump baby-faced companion, but in general, thought Joanna, he was moving like Danny had. Like that uncertain, stumbling shadow back on Woodman Avenue by the parking-lot…

Oh, shit. Oh, you poor, stupid kid…

His resemblance to Lester Chan was unmistakable.

“Lady, please, you got to get us out of here!” The shorter boy was almost in tears with terror. “I swear to God this isn’t a car-jacking and we’re not on drugs or nothing but please we gotta get out of here—”

Joanna asked quietly, “Was Nicky banging Lester’s girls?”

The plump boy stared at her in shock. Nicky continued to gaze vaguely into space. “Oh, man, you know about that?”

“Yeah.”

The boy’s face crumpled. He whispered, “They’re monsters—” and suddenly slapped his hand to his mouth, to hide the struggle against sobs. “They—”

“I know.” She put one hand (the one with the car-keys, not the mace) gently on his shoulder. “Where are they?”

“We gotta get away—”

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me… What’s your name?”

“Sean,” he sobbed. “Sean Sui.” He wore jeans and a t-shirt and his jacket – like Nicky’s – was a modified version of the matte pongee silk that Lester and his “boys” wore. For a few minutes he couldn’t answer. He was trembling.

“Sean. Where are they?”

He pointed across the street and down fifty or sixty feet. “The brown building.” Seven stories of lightless windows. Can these babes see in the dark? Of course they can. Shit…

She forced her own terror aside. “What happened?”

“Nicky… Nicky said he could fix it up with me, with one of the girls that works for his brother. All the guys in our class—”

Mentally, Joanna swore some more. Idiots! Of course… sixteen year old boys, your big brother’s a pimp, his girls are MIND-BLOWINGLY fabulous… God knows what he was charging his buddies…

Lester wouldn’t have come to Antryg at all, she realized, except for his brother.

“—they were saying it’s like this amazing sex. They were all like saying I got to try it, even though Lester would kill them if he heard about it. Nicky got this phone hook-up that he can wire into the office phone in the building, so he’ll know when the girls won’t have regular customers – they’re like these really expensive hookers – and then he’ll sneak us in the back—”

“Was anybody else with you tonight?” Joanna broke in, and Sean shook his head, and sniffled.

“Just me and Nicky.” He glanced worriedly at the taller boy, who didn’t seem to be following a word of the conversation.

“How many of them are there, do you know?”

“Nicky says five.”

FIVE??!!??

“But we get up there tonight and while Nicky is in with Angel, I hear these guys downstairs in Suzy’s apartment. I go out to the stairwell and look down, and it’s Lester and Hun-hun – that’s Lester’s driver – and the building guard and this real tall gwailo in glasses.”

Antryg. When Suzy wasn’t in the car he said, Show me where she stayed…

The boy swallowed hard. “And I know – Well, Lester Chan’s a real hard guy. Everybody who pays Nicky to go – uh – have sex with these girls, they know we can’t ever ever let Lester find out, ‘cause it’s not just he’ll tell your dad or something: you’re looking at getting beat up really bad. But two guys I know, they pay Nicky and go do this like two or three times a week. So I see Lester down there, and Lester is saying how Suzy committed suicide this morning—”

(So much for ‘This guy named Steve’ murdering her and running away…)

“—and this gwailo says, like, if she committed suicide how come there’s no pill bottle and no pills, like you said, and how come the bedroom door is broken, and there’s furniture all torn up down there… And I’m thinking, How come Lester brought a cop in? Though this guy doesn’t look like a cop. And then he says, You better tell me the truth, ‘cause if we don’t catch her she’s going to start hunting on her own, and who she’s going to start on is probably going to be you.”

“What happened to them?” Joanna glanced back at the building. “Lester, and his boys, and the white guy. Are they still in there?”

“I don’t know! I go back into Angel’s apartment and she and Nicky are just coming out of the bedroom, and I said, Lester’s downstairs and he says Suzy killed herself today… And Nicky’s like just, Hunh? like he’s kind of dazed, and Angel sort of frowns and says, Well, fuck, just like that—” The tone he’d used had been more appropriate to a broken fingernail than the death of a sister, “and then she…”

His words choked again, as if he still couldn’t cope with what he’d seen. “And then she grabs Nicky by the shoulders and kisses him, only it’s like… It’s like she changed. It’s like I was looking at her, in this nightie she’s wearing, only I’m seeing what’s inside her, and it’s ugly and scabby and dirty, like when you kick aside a garbage-can and find a whole nest of rats eating a dead dog… I’m not making this up,” he added, looking back at Joanna – for he’d turned his face aside at the memory. “It’s not something I imagined. It’s… I saw it! And I smelled it. And Nicky’s eyes get big and he tries to pull away from her, and she holds him by the arms, with her mouth on his. She’s like biting his lips, I can see blood… And he tries to turn his head and I can see he’s fighting her and it’s like when a grown-up grabs a little kid.

“And I yelled Stop it! and ran up and hit her, and she let him go and looked at me, kind of smiling and holding out her hand, just like she didn’t think I’d just seen her kiss Nicky, with Nicky’s blood all over her mouth; or she didn’t think I’d care. And Nicky’s just standing there with his lips bleeding, just staring. And even though I’d just seen what she was like inside, and just seen what she did, I thought, No, man, I was wrong, that was just a dream, and the only thing I could think of was that I wanted to – like – have sex with her right that second.”

“Since you’re here,” said Joanna softly, “I’m guessing you didn’t.”

Sean shook his head, sniffled again and wiped his nose with his sleeve. “I grabbed Nicky’s hand and ran. And Nicky—” He looked back at the other boy, who just stood, his eyes a sleepy vacancy, although once or twice he’d made a move to walk back across the street… presumably, back to Angel for another kiss. “I don’t know what she did to him…”

“I do,” said Joanna. “Sort of. You get in my car, and you lock the doors—”

“The cops don’t come by here real often,” provided Sean. “I thought, if I watched his car, one would drive by eventually…”

“They probably will. But in the meantime, if Angel or any of her sisters come out… Do all of them live in the same building?”

Sean nodded, and fumbled a key from his pocket. “They won’t come out. Lester keeps the place locked. Nicky had a key made…”

Of course he did. Shit. Four of them. How telepathic are they? Shit…

“Okay. Just stay in the back seat and keep the doors locked and don’t let Nicky get out – because if Angel or one of her sisters do get out he may try to. I have – uh, stuff – that will help take out these things.”

“Like wolfsbane and that kind of stuff?” whispered Sean. “Is Angel like… like a vampire?”

“Sort of,” said Joanna, and opened the back seat, wondering if there was anything she’d forgotten to ask. “You just sit tight.” She pulled the big “car” flashlight out from under the seat, added it to the already formidable avoirdupois of her purse.

“Should I come with you?” He deserved the Congressional Medal of Honor for the offer, considering how scared he was, but Joanna shook her head.

“Somebody needs to stay with Nicky.”

He nodded – though only fifteen or sixteen he was taller than she and visibly felt it his duty to ask. Chivalry is not dead… He handed her the key: “The door locks when you go through it. Angel’s up on the fourth floor, the other girls higher up I think.”

“Thanks… and don’t you fucking DARE hot-wire my car and drive off.”

Joanna crossed the street at a run, the can of mace in one hand (How many squirts do I get in one can?) and the key in the other. How quickly can Suzy travel from Granada Hills? Does Angel have some way of summoning her?

They knew Suraklin the Dark Mage… or knew about him, anyway. And they knew Antryg had been his minion. Can they read minds, or just emotional states? How fast can they move?

Pretty fast, if Suzy had followed her to Granada Hills.

They’re brilliantly manipulative…

She’d known in any case that doubt and indecision would disable Joanna’s reaction for self-defense. That childlike vulnerability would let her get close enough to strike. Her purse clonked against her thigh, weighed down with the flashlight and the widget she’d grabbed from the workroom table. DID Suraklin teach him how to build a trap for them?

Does HE think they’re just like little birds, to be consumed for their magic?

How much of what she said was lies?

The iron security-gate of that squat brown building had been opened a crack. A noise – a shadow flickering in the corner of her eye – brought her heart to her throat, but when she spun around there was nothing to be seen.

The door beyond was set back in a sort of recess up two worn steps. The short hall – Joanna risked a quick flare of her flashlight – was plain and bare, but the walls looked like they’d been painted recently and the place smelled of dampness, old cloth, and cleaning-fluid rather than vomit and piss. A door on her left was locked. One on her right opened into a small office whose telephone – Joanna picked it up – had no dial-tone. Because that poor imbecile Nicky had tapped it, or was there some kind of code? (Hitting 9, or 1, or any other key on the pad got her nothing). The light-switch didn’t work, either. Not in the office, not in the hall.

Feeling – ready to swear – that there was something, somewhere in the darkness behind her, Joanna edged forward.

The double-door at the end of the hall led to a stair, dark as the abysses of Cocytus. A man lay at the bottom, his eyes open. When she stepped near a Size-XXXL cockroach ran off his face, but to her horror Joanna saw the man was breathing. The same small cuts and tooth-marks marked his lips that Angel had left on Nicky’s. Despite the fact that there were other roaches around (You’re about to go up against four mind-siphoning vampires with nothing but a flashlight and you’re worried about COCKROACHES???) she knelt and shook him. Though his eyes moved disinterestedly to her he didn’t speak.

He had a holster, but it was empty.

If they can see in the dark, it doesn’t matter if I have the flashlight on.

One hand on the rail, keeping tight to the wall, she ascended, straining her ears. An old-fashioned revolver lay on the step about two from the top: empty. She added it to the load in her purse. There may be ammo someplace…

Would that do any good?

Obviously Lester strangling Suzy or whatever he’d done hadn’t worked.

The original factory’s warehouse floor was at the top of the stairs. The flashlight beam showed her a high ceiling, but everything beneath it was jammed with rolls of fabric: six feet tall, as big around as the span of her arms, thick with dust and smelling of rat-piss and mould. It was as if the entire room were packed shoulder-to-shoulder with clumsy, cylinder-shaped stand-ins for a crowd. Narrow, pitch-black trails snaked between them, leading to a hundred or more inky niches. Here and there a whisp of plastic coating caught her flashlight’s glint.

Anything could have been there.

And would be behind her, when she went up the stairs.

Behind her like whatever it was she might or might not have glimpsed outside…

Lester, I hope you die and go to Hell for getting us into this…

Something fell upstairs, a soft, heavy bumbling noise – More fabric rolls – and Lester screamed, “Don’t hurt her!”

Joanna dashed up the next flight of stairs, flashlight beam jerking and jolting over the dingy walls. The third floor was warehouse also, an almost-solid wall of fabric rolls confronting her, with sounds of struggle coming from somewhere within the labyrinth of trails and piles and stacks. Joanna climbed five more steps on the open iron stair to look out over the top of the goods – the room was easily a hundred feet long by forty wide and crammed – and saw where dark shapes rocked and heaved in the flare of a flashlight-beam. Before she could spring to the floor again strong hands grabbed her from behind – from higher up the stair – and she smelled perfume as a hard arm tried to hook around her throat.

She twisted in the lamia’s grasp – because it was a lamia, sweetly beautiful in a lace shirt and leggings – and let her have it point-blank in the eyes with the mace. The girl screamed, clawing at her eyes, and Joanna wrenched free and darted down the steps and into the forest of yard-goods.

Lester was yelling incoherently and a whole stack of rolls – hundreds of pounds of smothering leopard-print plush – fell almost on top of Joanna. She sprang back, scrambled, slipping, over the rolling masses to where she could see Antryg now, pinned against a wall of fabric-rolls with a lamia gripping each arm, with the strength Joanna now knew too well. A third girl shoved the unresisting Lester aside, strode into the fray and grabbed Antryg by the hair; he kicked her away full-force and the blow didn’t seem to phase her at all. She caught up what looked like a piece of iron pipe from the floor and sprang in again.

Antryg shouted, “Lester!” despairingly but when Lester dived in it was to try to wrench the sword out of Antryg’s hand. Another man – presumably Hun-hun, Lester’s driver – stepped tentatively toward the fray with the slightly dazed appearance of a man who no longer realizes quite where he is…

Joanna lunged without thinking at the redhead with the pipe, shoulder-blocked her out of the way and leaped back as the young woman grabbed at her (Do NOT let her touch you…). She sprayed mace in the girl’s eyes, swung around to do the same to Lester, who blundered into the struggling forms beside him. Antryg wrenched free, grabbed Joanna by the wrist, and dragged her into the maze of fabric-rolls, Lester screaming after them “I told you not to hurt them! Just make them give me my soul back! Give me my brother back!”

“You can’t,” whispered Joanna, “can you? He’s down in the car,” she added. “Nicky…”

Antryg shook his head, wiped the blood from the side of his face where one of the lamia had clawed at his eyes; his glasses were gone and he turned his head from side to side, listening rather than watching, sniffing for all Joanna knew… “Thank you, my dear. Are you all right?” And, when she nodded, “And the brother… Nicky?”

“He’s with a friend of his – he was selling his school-friends time with the girls—”

“Young idiot!” But his face, and his voice, were filled with compassion rather than impatience or anger. “You didn’t happen to bring me that etheric trap I was building from my workroom, did you?”

She produced the crab-like tangle of disk-drives and crystal from her purse.

He grinned hugely, and folded her in a breath-taking embrace. “That’s my Joanna. There was a bottle…”

She held it up. Her hands were shaking from reaction and her left shoulder, where the doe-eyed redhead had clipped her with the end of the pipe, hurt unbelievably, filling her eyes with tears of sheer pain.

“That’s poison, man!” Lester stumbled from the dusty smother around them, struck at the little olive-jar. “All I want you to do is show me how to control them!”

“Man, stay quiet!” hissed the driver, crowding behind them. “They’re right—”

Antryg flicked a toggle on his etheric trap, twisted two pairs of wires together, then flung the trap away into the darkness behind him – Joanna yelled, “Hey!” and the driver caught Lester in time to prevent him from dashing away into the black labyrinth to find it.

“It’s open now, it’ll work wherever it is. Thank you,” he added, taking the sword from the driver, who’d evidently pulled it away from Lester in the melee. He whipped a bandana from his pocket, doused it from the olive-bottle and wiped the blade with it. “Lester, listen to me—”

“He’s lying.” The blonde girl in the lace shirt appeared in the between two towering cliffs of fabric, just within the range of the flashlight beams. Her face – as Suzy’s had been – was filled with childlike terror, her eyes with tears. “Don’t listen to him, Lester. He’s going to kill us – to drink our lives, to take our souls into himself to increase his power. Lester, please…”

The young man looked wildly from Antryg to the girl. “Angel—”

“Your brother is safe,” said Angel gently. “His youth – his innocence – will make it easy for us to return to him the energy we’ve taken. We’ll return yours to you, Lester, of course we will. We didn’t realize—”

“That is a lie.” Antryg’s voice was low and harsh. “They can no more return your mind, or your brother’s mind, than you can return a french-fry you ate last week. I’m sorry, but that’s what lamia do. That’s what they are.”

Angel flinched, and a sob shook her. “Please,” she whispered. “PLEASE…! We are not what he says, I swear it! Maybe he believes it himself, but it isn’t true! Our lives – our souls – is all he wants, all he cares about! I’m begging you, Lester…! You’ve been so good to us, so gentle… You have no concept of the use to which he’ll put us. To which he’ll put you, and Nicky—”

Lester swung around to Antryg. “Is that true?”

“Of course it isn’t true, you lack-wit! Listen to me! These are lamia – vampires—”

“And if you are so wise, and so good,” queried Angel softly, “how can you blame us for being as we are? Those who came to us came of their own free will. You cannot say we’ve hurt any of them. We’ve made them happy—”

“You have taken their minds.” He was listening around him in the darkness, gauging his time to strike, and – carefully keeping her back to the soft lumpiness of the wall – Joanna edged as far from him as she felt she safely could, considering what she knew to be somewhere, just outside the range of the flashlights. The white glare picked out the glint of his earrings, and the blade of the sword, waiting for an opening. “I can’t let that continue.”

“You can’t let?” Her brows puckered. Joanna heard a rustle – the other girls, moving behind them, among those leaden bastions of velvets and plush. “Are you the guardian of this world, then? Its ruler? Is it for you to choose? We cannot change what we are. Would you kill us for that? We aren’t evil, as your master was evil.” She held out her hands. “Did he never tell you, that we can return what we’ve taken?”

“He told me,” said Antryg, “that you are mistresses of illusion and lies.”

“As he was the shining light of truth?” Her smile was amused. “Fetch the boy Nicky from your woman’s car, if you doubt me—”

“You got Nicky here?” Lester gasped.

Antryg snapped, “No,” and Joanna knew that her own startle gave him the lie.

“What the hell you done with my brother?!?” Lester wrenched his arm free of his driver’s hand, grabbed the driver’s gun from his pocket, and fired, the impact of the bullet knocking Antryg backward into the soft, gaudy wall of rolls.

Joanna dived for the sword as it dropped from his hand; Lester fired at her and she heard the bullet bury itself with a soft pfutt! in a roll of velvet close enough to her head to spray her face with dust. She dodged back into the darkness but saw Hun-hun grab for his boss’s hand again and saw Lester shoot him, point-blank, in the chest. Joanna managed to snatch the poison-soaked rag, whipped her Swiss Army knife from her purse as Angel stooped over Antryg’s crumpled body, wiped the blade and reached Angel in two steps, driving the four-inch steel into the lamia’s shoulder.

Angel swung around, clutching the bleeding wound, staring at her in fury and horror. Took one step towards her, hands reaching, then doubled over with a sobbing scream. Lester screamed, too – “ANGEL!!!” and fell to his knees at her side. Angel’s groping hands seized his hair, dragged his mouth down to hers, at the same instant that the other four girls – including Suzy, her face distorted with fury – emerged from all sides from the darkness.

Antryg yelled “RUN!!!” and instead Joanna snaked past Suzy to Antryg’s side where he was struggling to rise; she whipped around, knife held out, wondering if this would hurt and if she’d miss herself when she was brain-dead like poor Nicky…

A man Joanna had never seen before stepped out from the darkness between the walls of fabric, scooped up Antryg’s sword from the floor, and with one neat slash opened bleeding cuts across the backs of two of the lamia. They whirled, shrieking as Angel had shrieked, and the unwounded two darted for the nearest openings into the black mazes of the old warehouse.

Joanna grabbed the closest roll of bridal satin and shoved, bringing down several hundred pounds of pink and turquoise acetates onto one of the girls and in front of the other. She sprang in with her Army knife – it was amazing, she reflected later, how fast she could move knowing her life was at stake – and slashed Suzy across the arm. Behind her she heard the other girls screaming.

When she turned around the newcomer was wiping Antryg’s sword on some of the trodden maelstrom of polyester taffeta underfoot, and the lamia he’d just slashed was crumpled, convulsing, at his feet.

Angel lay still across Lester’s body. Joanna could see Lester was breathing, and that his eyes were open.

She ran to Antryg, who was chalk-white in the glare of the flashlight, blood seeping from the bullet-wound in his left shoulder; he put his uninjured arm around her and drew her back as the newcomer slashed a length of linen from the nearest bolt, moved toward them holding out both bandage and sword. Antryg took the weapon first, passed it to Joanna, then took the cloth. The newcomer raised his eyebrows, but fetched Antryg’s glasses from the floor where they’d been kicked, and handed them to him likewise.

“Thank you.” Antryg straightened the wire frame, and put them carefully on.

“Thank you.” The man made a courteous bow. He looked about ten years younger Antryg – in his middle thirties – with a fine-boned face and too many lines around his light-colored eyes. His clothing – jeans, blazer, and the sort of cardigan sweater-vest that Joanna associated with Oxford dons – had an old-fashioned air, and he wore soft leather gloves on his hands. “They aren’t dead, are they? That… that thing you hurled behind the fabric…”

“Has trapped their souls, yes.” Antryg winced as Joanna wound a pressure-bandage tight. “When the poison drove them out of their bodies.” The bullet had gone clean through: there was blood everywhere. She wondered how much she’d have to bribe Jim – who’d been a medic in Nam – to make repairs without contacting the police. A half-gallon of Wild Turkey should probably do it…

“Are you a wizard, then?”

“I am, though of course I can’t prove it since in this universe I haven’t any powers… Didn’t I have this conversation already? If you don’t mind, my partner and I will just go fetch the trap…”

He took Joanna firmly by the wrist and led her away into the narrow black tunnels of the maze. As he did so she glanced back at their rescuer, wondering what was odd about him…

He wasn’t breathing. The warehouse was cold: her own breath and Antryg’s were traces of diamond in the flashlight beam.

“You have got to be kidding,” she said, as they wormed through the walls of fabric. “Is he a…?”

“Hush.” Antryg touched his lips with his finger. “They have very sharp ears.”

The etheric trap had landed on a pile of folded polyester lace that was yellow with age; the crystal wired in its center glowed faintly. Antryg picked up the trap, studied the crystal, then put his ear to the side of the trap and flicked a corner of it a couple of times with his fingernail. Joanna wondered what he heard within.

“What will you do with it?” inquired their rescuer, when Antryg and Joanna returned to the open space around the stairs. Lester was sitting up, but had made no effort to wipe away the blood from his chewed lips, and simply gazed into space. Joanna wondered whether he and Nicky had family to look after them.

Antryg didn’t answer right away, but instead knelt to look into Lester’s eyes, and for a time pressed his palms to either side of the young man’s head. Some of his expression of grieved anger abated; when he straightened up again, he merely looked deeply sad.

“I’ll take it out to the desert,” he replied, “where there’s less danger of abominations crossing through if the Void is opened. The lamia are quite comfortable in the trap – not in pain, and in no danger of starving. I’ll open a hole in the Void – not a gate all the way through, just a sort of portal – and pitch them in. They’ll even have one another for company.”

“Not the sort of companions I would care to spend eternity with,” murmured the stranger, and wiped a fleck of blood from the cuff of his glove. “I could be bounded in a nut-shell…” He shook his head, medium-sized, slender, fair-haired and, Joanna thought, with a face that wasn’t precisely alien… but wasn’t the face of a twentieth-century man. “I owe you my thanks,” he added, with another bow. He held out his gloved hand, which after a moment’s hesitation Antryg took and shook. “They can’t be killed, can they? I was aware of them, but had no idea how to rid my – ah – territory…” He glanced at Joanna, “…of their presence. I am greatly in your debt. Anything I can do—”

“I ask only,” returned Antryg, stepping cautiously back, “the usual terms of recompense.”

The stranger studied Joanna’s face for a moment, as if memorizing it; his eyes, where they caught the flashlight’s glare, gleamed reflectively, like a cat’s. “A small price to pay,” he murmured, and Joanna, realizing what the ‘usual terms’ were, thought, Oh, yikes…

“But if ever I have need of your – er – specialized talents, I trust—”

“I do not make bargains,” said Antryg quietly, “with the kindred of darkness.”

“Ah.” The man smiled a close-lipped smile. “No, I didn’t suppose you would. But I see past bargains in your eyes, my friend. And past purchases. And you will permit me to observe, that I have seldom encountered one of your own persuasion whose backtrail wasn’t strewn with collateral damage.”

Joanna glanced quickly up at the wizard’s face, and saw his expression momentarily freeze, as if the stranger’s remark had cut deep. When she looked back, the stranger was gone.

*

Joanna phoned the police, and by the time the officers of the LAPD Central Division reached the building, the bodies of the five lamia had quietly disintegrated into anomalous little heaps of dust which should keep the gentlemen in Forensics busy for years. Lester Chan was arrested for the murder of his driver, George Xiaohan, but Joanna guessed he wouldn’t be considered mentally competent to stand trial. Sean Sui provided contact information for the Chan brothers’ closest relatives, an aunt and uncle who lived in San Francisco and had washed their hands of their wayward nephew years ago when he first started getting in trouble with the “Chinese mafia” in Monterrey Park. Antryg came up with a thoroughly convincing tale of a drug-fuelled fight over one of the girls between the driver, the building guard – who turned out to be the driver’s brother – and Chan. Joanna – whose own story, repeated later at the hearing, was a much more straightforward account of going in and finding everybody already dead – was a little surprised at how his glib version of events covered everything (including the nearly-empty can of mace found at the scene) that could possibly be a clue. Considering how dotty he appeared, wizardry had given Antryg a meticulous eye for details. Neither the police, nor the doctors at the Good Samaritan Hospital emergency room later, seemed to notice that he was still carrying a fully sharpened katana. In the end they spent the rest of the night in the ER, so Joanna was saved the price of a bottle of Wild Turkey after all.

The following day they drove out to the wilds of San Bernardino County, far past Barstow, and hiked into the high desert, where Antryg opened a small portal in the Void and pitched the etheric trap through it.

I could be bounded in a nut-shell, the Los Angeles vampire had quoted Hamlet…

For all eternity? ALL ETERNITY? With Suzy and Angel and two other individuals who’d spent the past couple of months absorbing all the hatreds, all the selfishness, all the psychological foulness of a succession of johns plus whatever addicts, alcoholics, and mentally shattered lost souls Suzy had found sleeping on the sidewalks of San Pedro Street in the small hours…?

“Can they help what they are?” she asked, as she and Antryg started the long walk back to the car. “Could they have made a choice to be different?”

“I don’t know.” He sounded troubled, and very tired; autumn wind whipped dust through the tangle of his unruly hair. “When one talks to a lamia, one is usually talking to… to what the lamia thinks you want to hear. To whatever the lamia thinks you’ll respond to. And then they’ll go and do whatever the average agglomerate of their previous victims would have done.”

“You’ve dealt with them before.”

“Oh, yes.”

He shifted his left arm uncomfortably in its sling, and winced; Joanna fished in her purse and handed him a couple of Demerol, a dose long overdue because he’d refused to take anything before opening the portal in the Void. He swallowed them, and they walked on for a time in silence. It was October, and the sun had a chilly whiteness over the lizard-colored scrub. Distantly, huge outcrops of rock – two hundred feet high, some of them – dotted the landscape as if a cosmic herd of mega-Godzillas had come through pooping as they went. A hawk circled in the aching sky.

“And are regular vampires – like the one who helped you out – are they the same?”

His thoughts came back from a great distance, and he propped his skewed glasses on the beak of his nose.

“Heavens, no. Vampirism in this world is simply a virus – and vampires like our friend tend to be extremely careful about their kills. Hence his resentment of competition on his hunting-ground – the cast-offs of society, the people that no one will miss… and his vexation, because the lamia would eventually have drawn attention to themselves, and thus to him. He’ll change his hunting-grounds now, probably for decades…” Pain and weariness folded a slight line between his brows.

How WOULD you track a vampire in the Greater Los Angeles area?

“Vampires are completely human,” he went on after a time. “It makes them much easier to deal with. The only thing they have in common with the lamia is their selfishness.”

“Did Suraklin devour them – lamia, I mean – to give himself power in worlds where there wasn’t any?”

He nodded, and a shadow passed across his eyes at the mention of his master’s name. “They told you that?”

“Suzy did. Could you have done the same? To – to get yourself magic?”

“Probably. He showed me how to do it.” His frown deepened, with pain possibly, or with old memories. “Though when we crossed the Void to a world without magic, if he caught a lamia he’d keep it to himself.

“And I wasn’t… The changes in him, afterwards, were minor enough that I was never quite certain what I was seeing – like poor Lester. I think every time he did it, it changed him a little more. But I never could be sure.” The breezy light-mindedness with which, Joanna suspected, he covered his memories – even from himself – faded briefly, before the painkiller that acted on him like a couple of glasses of wine: before the darkness in his eyes.

“That’s how I know about them. And they weren’t the only creatures of magic that he devoured – and in their natural state they’re actually little more sentient than bats or mice – not that I haven’t had perfectly interesting conversations with mice…”

She said softly, “No wonder you went a little crazy, growing up like that.”

“Oh, I was already quite crazy when I met him,” Antryg hastened to assure her. “Please don’t blame him for that.”

Joanna laughed.

“The thing is, I realize, looking back, that I don’t even know what he was like before he started doing this. Whether what I was seeing was… was really him, his true self, or the result of what he’d done for years upon years. Even as it took me a long time to realize what he was like, once I lived beneath his roof.”

Joanna said nothing, remembering again the fragile-looking, dark-haired girl on the porch in her skimpy garments of leather and lace. We’ve NEVER meant anyone any harm…

Thought about Lester and Nicky, and that poor security guard, doomed to years of corrective therapy at the very least, and a gray half-life forever, being looked after by others… Was that worse than dying?

Are you the guardian of this world? Angel had asked.

Joanna was afraid she knew the answer to that one. And it was, ironically, Suraklin the Dark Mage who had trained him for the job. Who had taught him about vampires, and lamia, and flesh-dissolving trans-dimensional abominations and etheric spirit-traps and everything else.

But the sense of responsibility was his own.

“I loved him,” said Antryg at last. “In many ways – in the heart of my hearts – I love him still. Sometimes I think I want you to see him as he was, to see him as I saw him… shining, glorious, like that Blake poem about the tiger, so beautiful in his deadliness that you would give your life just to touch him. And yet he could be so kind. Maybe that was only because he guessed I’d respond to kindness.”

They crested a rise and the car lay before them, parked on the shoulder of the dirt cut-off that stretched back to Highway 40.

He sighed. “And I have no idea whether what I love is Suraklin at all, or the construct that he created which he knew I would most love. And every time I’m sure I’ve figured it out, I’ll dream about him… and in the dreams I’m so glad to see him again.”

“Every time?” asked Joanna quietly, and Antryg’s mouth twisted a little, at recollections of his own.

“No. Not every time.”

They scrambled down the rise, Antryg holding her hand steadyingly on the slithery gravel.

It would be dark, before they reached LA.

About the Author

Since her first published fantasy in 1982 – The Time of the Dark – Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Born and raised in Southern California, she attended the University of California, Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux, France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger, and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written another historical whodunnit series under the name of Barbara Hamilton.

Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.

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And Pretty Maids All In A Row

About The Author