Free Dead Things by Stephen Blackmoore Page B

tiny things. One guy, old Chumash feast god, I hear he’s got himself a drum circle in Santa Monica that keeps him going. Best he can do is get a bunch of New Age wannabes to follow him around as their guru. Nobody believes anymore. In any of them.”
    His eyes go distant and for a moment I can see the sands of the Sahara reflected in his eyes, the red and gold of the Brass City. I’ve never known Darius to get maudlin, but after hundreds of years stuck in here, maybe he’s getting a little cabin fever.
    “Never like the good old days,” he says. “Anyway, Miki. Party girl. Not as big on the whole vengeance, retribution thing like she is now. More a guardian. Took the souls to the underworld and watched over their bones.”
    “What happened to her?”
    “The fucking Spanish happened. That Cortez fuck. Before I came over here. Drove her believers underground, enslaved her people. For a while I heard she was scraping together an existence in Xibalba, chewing on scraps of the dead.” He shakes his head. “Couple hundred years of that shit’ll twist your head around.”
    “Can I trust her?”
    “Oh, fuck no. Especially not now. Like I said, her head’s twisted around. Batshit crazy. From what I hear she’s running angles and schemes, short and long cons. You’d think she was fucking Coyote or something.”
    “Will she try to break the laws?”
    “No, she won’t lie to you,” he says. “She’s got that much going for her. She keeps her promises. Death always does. But like the best grifters she knows how to fuck you with the truth.”
    “So I’m pretty much back at square one,” I say. I give him the lowdown on her clue and the job I’m doing for her.
    “Yeah, that sounds like her. Wish I could tell you more. She and I, we don’t talk. Not since her husband took himself out, what, 1800’s?”
    “She was married?”
    “Yeah. They shared the underworld together. Real badass but he couldn’t take the pressure. Some gods do that. They just sort of give up. That on top of everything else and she went off the deep end. Hey, there’s a cheery thought.”
    “What?”
    “She said, what, champion? That’s what she’s looking for? Sure it wasn’t ‘consort’?” He makes air quotes with his fingers, waggles his eyebrows.
    “Oh, dude, don’t even go there.”
    “Just sayin’. Could be she’s looking for a replacement.” Darius slaps me on the shoulder. “Could be worse. She doesn’t have to do the skeleton thing, you know. When I knew her she was smokin’.”
    Great. Now I’ve got a crazy death goddess making googly eyes at me.
    “I know I probably don’t have to tell you this,” he says, “but watch your ass. Miki’s not somebody to fuck around with.”
    I tap the side of my head. “Not something I’m likely to forget. Thanks. Appreciate it.”
    Darius has a wicked sense of humor and who knows what time it will be when I leave, but he’s acting weird. The way he spoke about “the good old days” makes me think he could use a little company.
    So I stick around for a couple more drinks, listen to some more jazz. He tells me about some new hotshot he’s been hanging out with. A girl running a flophouse in Skid Row for wayward supernaturals. Vampires and shit. Weird. I think he’s got the hots for her. God help her.
    When I finally leave only about an hour has gone by outside. Twenty bucks gets my car out of the parking lot. Rush hour traffic has the freeway backed up and the surface streets are a crawl. I pull the bottle of Stoli out of my coat pocket and look at the drunk ghost inside. Poor bastard. I should let him loose, but I’m not about to do it here in the car. Christ knows what he’d do.
    I haven’t run into too many stuck ghosts before and they’ve all been unpredictable. I put it back into my coat pocket. Besides a drunk in a bottle of Stoli and the terrifying idea that a death goddess might be looking at me for a boyfriend I’ve gotten fuck all from the trip.
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