Christopher Moore - Secondhand Souls

“And there we go,” said Rivera. He looked around, just in case Donny’s soul vessel might be sitting out like his mother’s, but nothing else was glowing. He backed out of the room and headed down the hall.

His phone buzzed again. There was also a text that had come in during the DeFazio deaths. Pick the fuck up , it said.

Rivera hit talk. “You said we weren’t supposed to talk unless it was an emergency.”

“Where’s your partner?” asked Minty Fresh.

“He’s watching my store while I’m out on a collection. I didn’t hear from you on the Lily girl, so he’s filling in until I find someone.”

“Where are you, not near him?”

“No. In Noe Valley. Looking for a vessel. I found another Death Merchant, and there’s more—”

“Yeah, we’ll get to that. Y’all might want to sit down, Inspector.”

Nick Cavuto was reading a Raymond Chandler short story called “Red Wind” behind the counter when the banshee stepped out of the stacks.

“ AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE !”

Cavuto dropped the paperback as he slid off the stool into a crouch, drew a ridiculously large revolver from his shoulder holster, and leveled it at the banshee. One motion.

“I will drop you, raggedy,” he said.

“I come to save your life, you great dolt, and you cast aspersions on me frock?”

Cavuto kept the gun trained on her and looked around it. “Save my life, huh?”

“You need to get out of here before dark, lad. There’s a nasty bit of business heading your way. They’re not strong enough to move in the daylight yet, but they’ll be here soon.”

“Raven women coming to take my soul?” Cavuto lowered the gun to his side. “Stay there.”

“They can’t kill a man for his soul, don’t know why, just the way of things, otherwise you’d all be rotting in the fields. But they will kill you for the sport.” She moved toward him, gestured that she was moving wide of the counter, toward the front door. “Let’s go, love, have a ride in your lovely carriage. I’ll hang me head out the window when I scream.” She smiled, black lips and bluish teeth—batted her sooty eyelashes.

Cavuto glanced over his shoulder and out the window. The streetlights were on and the little stripe of sky he could see was dying pink.

“There’ll be no screaming.”

“Aye, lad, let’s go, then.” She made a motion as if shooing errant chickens toward the door, the long tatters of her sleeves making trails like smoke.

There was a rumble from behind the shop and they both looked to the single window at the back of the store, high and narrow, four steel bars across it. As they watched, the window, lit yellow from the light in the alley, went black.

“Back door locked, then?” asked the banshee.

Cavuto nodded, not looking away from the window.

“Spendid. We’re off, then. Come along. Go swiftly and stay long, I always say.”

The rear window cracked and the shadow of a thousand birds oozed in between the cracks and down the back wall, spreading, form and light exchanging as it moved, like oily lace woven into the shapes of flying things. The shadow slid down onto the hardwood floor, splashed in waves over the shelves as it approached them. At one narrow, central shelf where Rivera displayed recently acquired books—soul vessels—the shadow coalesced, covered the whole shelf like a shroud.

The banshee could see the five souls, glowing dull red, and one by one, as the shadow enveloped them, they started to fade.

“Mad dash, love. Mad dash,” she said.

“You go,” said Cavuto. He trained the.44 Magnum on a spot at the middle of a dark shelf, fifteen feet away.

As the last soul vessel went dark, the shadow throbbed, gained dimension, split into three distinct masses that then undulated, changed, formed into three female figures, human to a degree, shimmering with fine, blue-black feathers; talons sprouted from the tips of their fingers, long and hooked like marlin spikes, the silver color of stars.

“Gun,” said one, her voice like gravel swishing in a pan. “I hate guns.”

“Well, lad, you’ve shat the bed now,” said the banshee.

It was a Wednesday night in San Francisco, and despite the fog having laid a soft blanket over the city and the foghorn singing its sad and low lullaby, no one slept well.

RIVERA

Inspector Alphonse Rivera was electrified by the shock and grief of finding Nick Cavuto dead in his bookstore. There were four units and an ambulance on the scene by the time Rivera got there. The EMTs were working on the big man on the floor—compressions on his chest, squeezing the bag to breathe for him, slamming syringes of adrenaline, and hitting him with defibrillator paddles. As soon as they got a heartbeat they would move him, they said.

There was blood, but not a tremendous amount, on Cavuto’s cutaway shirt.

Rivera could still smell the gunpowder in the air, as well as the more smoky aroma of burning peat. Cavuto’s big stainless-steel revolver lay on the floor by him.

“How long?” he asked the first officer he saw with a notebook who wasn’t interviewing someone. Nguyen on his nameplate. Rivera going into autopilot, not allowing what was happening a few feet behind him to become part of his reality.

“They’ve been working about ten minutes—since I’ve been on scene.”

“Gunshot wound?”

“Probably not,” the cop said. He cringed. “EMT said it looks more like a stab wound. Thin blade. Ice pick maybe.”

“Witnesses?”

“People all over on the street, drinkers, diners, people walking their dogs, you know this neighborhood. No one saw shit yet, still looking. ‘Shots fired’ call came from the nail place next door.” The officer looked at his notes. “Seven-oh-two. First unit on scene a minute later. Found him like this.”

Rivera checked his watch: 7:15.

Rivera looked around. The shelf where he had displayed the soul vessels was sprayed with a fine, oily fuzz, like black down, and even as Rivera watched, it was evaporating into vapor. He’d seen it before, a year ago, on the bricks in the alley where he’d pumped nine 9-mm rounds into one of the Morrigan to rescue Charlie Asher.

“We’re moving him!” barked one of the EMTs.

“He’s back?” Rivera asked.

The EMT whipped his head. “No, I’m calling an audible. We can get him to St. Francis in five. He needs a surgeon. Wound may have hit the heart.”

The other EMTs had already lifted Cavuto onto a gurney. Uniform cops were clearing the way to the ambulance.

“We’ll work on him until we can’t,” said the EMT over his shoulder as he went out the door.

“Tell them to check for venom,” Rivera said.

The EMT raised his eyebrows.

“Just do it.”

The EMT nodded and was out the door.

“People next door said they heard six shots, quick,” said Officer Nguyen. “Very, very loud.”

Rivera walked to the display shelf. The books, the five soul vessel books, were still there, lying on the floor, but they no longer glowed. Two rounds had hit the books on the top shelf, tearing cantaloupe-sized holes through the books, leaving shredded paper in the cavity like it had been nested by hamsters. He looked to the back of the store. Two more portals of shredded paper where the rounds had hit the books on the back wall.

Nguyen moved to his side as the last of the black feathers vaporized.

“What the fuck is that stuff? It was all over the place when I got here.”

“No idea,” said Rivera. Then, still on emotional autopilot, crime-scene robot on the scene, he said, “All the shots were Cavuto’s.” He pointed to the four impact points with his pen. He saw Nguyen’s eyes go wide at the craters in the books before him.